George Washington Crosby (1915-1995) and Howard Aaron Crosby (d. 1972)
were remarkable men, sturdy New Englanders who didn't just let life happen
to them. Howard, the father, was a traveling salesman who rode his
mule-drawn wooden wagon through the Maine hills, selling things to
backwoods people who lived in somber isolation. George, his son, got an
engineering degree at night, taught high school, became a guidance
counselor, retired at 60, then spent the rest of his life repairing
clocks. Now George is dying, on a rented hospital bed in the living room
of the house he built himself, as his family - wife, kids and grandkids -
tend to him during his final few hundred hours left on earth. And as they
do, George (who is hallucinating, his house collapsing around him)
remembers both his life and the life of his father (who was epileptic)
with lucid, almost microscopic detail.
Harding's story of these two men - unknown to the world, but each highly accomplished in his own way - is usually interesting, occasionally moving and rarely mannered or pretentious (as stories about rural death can be). By the time it's over, an artist could probably recreate George's home accurately down to the paintings and clocks on the wall. When George built the home, "lightning struck once when he was in the open foundation, soldering the last joint on the hot-water tank. It threw him to the opposite wall. He got up and finished the joint." Now that's a sturdy New Englander. They live a no-frills life: The town doctor wore eyeglasses, "justified because of his profession," but apparently, everyone else just squinted and made do. On his rounds as a salesman, Howard, the son of a minister who lost his mind, once delivered a baby, saved a drowning girl, and pulled the rotted tooth of a hermit who claimed to have attended Bowdoin College with Nathaniel Hawthorne, although nobody believed him. To thank Howard, the old man gave him a copy of The Scarlet Letter autographed by the author.
George and especially Howard survived in an age of unspoken anxieties, but they managed them well enough to live productive lives, for this was a time before we knew what anxieties were - or at least before we had license to indulge them. "Howard resented the ache in his heart," Harding tells us.
He resented equally the ache and the resentment itself. He resented his resentment because it was a sign of his own limitations of spirit and humility, no matter that he understood that such was each man's burden. He resented the ache because it was uninvited, seemed imposed, a sentence, and, despite the encouragement he gave himself each morning, it baffled him because it was there whether the day was good or bad, whether he witnessed major kindness or minor transgression, suffered sourceless grief or spontaneous joy.
Harding writes evocatively and yet tells his stories concisely, only occasionally indulging a passage that seems to want to transcend normal time and space (i.e., a few of his sentences last for a page or more). The gaze is decidedly inward, and although the story of the Crosby family takes place throughout the whole of the 20th Century, there's no mention of any war or the strife of the world around them. It's a nice little book - a sincere window into a very particular world - that understands its characters and recreates the sensations of their lives with clarity and insight, the sort of book you would expect a well-educated (Iowa Writers' Workshop) first-time novelist to write.
In 1987, The New Yorker published a piece, written by the perfectly named
Eric Metaxas, called "That Post-Modernism!", in which the author reviewed
the latest purported titles in the emerging literary genre. His subjects
included such books as "The Name of Pete Rose," "Hola, Buzzy: Memoirs of
an Argentine Insect," and "Veal Fuselage," which "brings into question the
very notion of 'book,' made as it is of large steel girders and fur."
Chapter 12 of Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad is a 75-page PowerPoint presentation, by 12-year-old Alison Blake, that flashes forward to the year 2020-something to look at the future family of her mother, Sasha, one of the novel's two central characters. In circles, squares, rectangles, triangles, trapezoids, charts and speech bubbles linked by lines and arrows, Alison catalogues her family's myriad quirks and dysfunctions. The squabbles among the two adults and their two kids are pretty routine (think Updike, Tyler or Ford in the Pulitzer Prize canon), so it's no wonder Egan juiced them up. Her po-mo imagination makes reading it just a little harder for us, but no doubt much harder for Knopf, which had to set it all in type.
Goon Squad traverses many decades (from the '70s to the future), generations (at least three), "scenes" (on both coasts) and points of view. The multi-faceted, multi-voiced narration is sometimes über-omniscient (in the '70s, the narrator speculates on the Facebook and Google futures of the characters) and sometimes first- or second-person. It's impressive writing in a virtuoso way, but the story that Egan tells is at once too contrived and too clichéd to be of any consequence: Goon Squad is a mordant satire of faded celebrities, genocidal dictators, desperate publicists, mentally ill journalist/rapists, malicious social climbers, and all of the people in their wobbly orbit. In fact, the book falls somewhere between a collection of interlocking stories and a novel, no doubt just what Egan intended (and what Elizabeth Strout did two years ago in her Pulitzer novel Olive Kitteridge, albeit in a much more conventional way).
Egan's storytelling jumps around in time, a technique that's become trendy in movies as a way to mask what's essentially soap opera or melodrama. The two primary sections - before PowerPoint, and then the final chapter, which takes place in a futuristic New York kept safe by hovering helicopters - are titled "A" and "B," as in: How do we get from Point A to Point B in our lives? The "goon squad" of the title is that ruthless assailant - time.
This all means that it's hard to say who Egan's two main characters "are," so let's just go with who they are when we meet them in the first two chapters: Bennie Salazar, 44, a famous music producer, divorced with a 9-year-old son, sort of impotent and with little sexual desire, sprinkling gold flakes in his coffee as a curative (or palliative); and Sasha Grady, 35, an unmarried kleptomaniac in therapy for her affliction, and no longer Bennie's assistant after many years in his employ.
From here, Egan unravels their relatively straightforward lives (for people of their profession and station) and the lives of the people around them. The PowerPoint chapter is either a welcomed change or a cheap trick, depending upon your level of tolerance. Egan's characters drop lots of names (musicians and such - some real, some not), but Egan herself doesn't seem to have any particular insight into the history of pop music or culture. Perhaps she didn't want to (she makes up the celebrities she eviscerates). Her novel is entertaining, imaginative, lugubrious, and emotionally uninvolving, with flashes of black humor - that is to say, pretty run of the mill, despite working so diligently to seem like a big vast ocean of originality and insight.
©Copyright 2011
By Harry Kloman
University of Pittsburgh