A Visit from the Goon Squad

“It jarred Sasha to think of herself as a glint in the hazy memories that Alex would struggle to organize a year or two from now: Where was that place with the bathtub? Who was that girl?” 

This statement foreshadows the end of the novel, when Alex makes his next appearance, this time working with Bennie Salazar himself. In “Found Objects,” as Sasha observes that Alex will have forgotten about her in a year or two, we become aware of how little hope she has in her future, how little sense of connection she feels to the people she meets. By the end of the novel, however, although the statement proves true on one hand—Alex’s memory of her is fractured and hazy—we see that her life has progressed in such a way that she is no longer physically or emotionally in this place, that while Alex revisits the space and struggles to remember, Sasha has found a full new life somewhere far away from here. 

“She was aware of having made a move in the story she and Coz were writing, taken a symbolic step. But toward the happy ending, or away from it?”

When Alex pours the bath salts into the bathtub, the scent in the room provokes Sasha’s memory of the friend from whom she stole them. The stolen object carries her into the past, reminding her of Lizzie and forcing Sasha to face the pain of having lost her friendship. At the same time, the scent in the room gestures toward Sasha’s unknown future. When Alex opens the package and pours out the contents, he takes away the power Sasha has given it in her reality. 

“They were approaching his former house, as he thought of it. He couldn’t say ‘old house,’ but he also couldn’t say ‘house’ anymore, although he’d certainly paid for it” 

In later chapters, we learn that Bennie had a hand in building this house, which is located in the wealthy neighborhood where he aspired to live, but never fully assimilated into. Although Bennie still feels a sense of ownership over the house, having “paid for it” financially and emotionally, he can no longer articulate what the house means to him. This highlights the effects of time on meaning, a motif that recurs throughout the novel. 

The narrator of this story is seeing Vic at what might be his last innocent moment, and she is thinking about the youthful flirtation that they might have while he is about to realize that his sister has died. It’s worth noting that Kerry’s death is almost never confronted head-on in these stories; the trauma of it is left unspoken by the Lang family, despite the fact that it contributed to the trauma that drives each of the Lang characters throughout the collection.

A Visit from the Goon Squad uses occasional narrative markers to situate the stories in historical time. The absence of the Twin Towers, together with Sasha’s strong awareness of that absence, situates this episode shortly after 9/11. The positive quality of absence, that an empty space or silence has a character of its own, is an idea that recurs throughout the novel.

“Nostalgia was the end—everyone knew that” 

Although Bennie is thinking about his old mentor, Lou Kline, we can tell that the statement is also a reflection of Bennie’s own anxieties. Now in his mid-forties and despairing of how his industry is changing, Bennie fears that his own end is near. By the end of the novel, nostalgia actually becomes the means by which Bennie is able to revive his failed career, as Scotty’s concert becomes an event that a new generation of music fans will regard with fond memories.

“No one is waiting for me. In this story, I’m the girl no one is waiting for” 

On the surface, Rhea, the narrator of Chapter 3, is a teenager who feels excluded from her group because, to her mind, she is undesirable. Within the novel, Rhea is in fact a person who seems to exist only to tell other people’s stories. The little we see of her life indicates that her she remains relatively consistent. Much like Sasha’s conversation with Coz in Chapter 1, Rhea’s statement draws attention to the importance of story itself as a subject of the novel. Rhea’s statement about “waiting” also draws attention to the passage of time—even when nothing is happening, people are waiting for something or someone. 

“When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it’s happened?” 

Rhea is describing Bennie’s hairstyle when he is a teenager, trying to fit into the San Francisco punker scene. This statement is not merely a question of hair length and style; rather it speaks to the deeper question of identity. At what point does someone shift from an aspirational version of his desired identity into a fully realized member of that group? An added level of irony comes from the origin of the word Mohawk, the name of a particular group of Native Americans who not traditionally wear their hair in this way.

“The members of Ramsey’s safari have gained a story they’ll tell for the rest of their lives. It will prompt some of them, years from now, to search for each other on Google and Facebook, unable to resist the wish-fulfillment fantasy that these portals offer: Whatever happened to . . . ?” 

The narrator shifts into a future mode to tell the reader what will happen to these characters decades later, in this case a mundane statement about people’s tendency to want to return to defining events in the past. This statement speaks to the ways in which a shared experience gains a significance that reaches beyond the event itself, as the participants will later create their own versions of what happened, each recreating the experience in his or her own way.

“Once, we hid behind the pool house after a concert, Lou yelling for me, ‘Joc-elyn! Joc-elyn!’ Rolph and I giggling while the generator droned in our chests. Later I thought: My first kiss. Which was crazy. Everything I would ever do, I’d done by then” 

Jocelyn, who at seventeen has already had a sexual relationship with Lou Kline, describes how she feels when she kisses Lou’s son, Rolph, who is exactly her age. With Rolph, she gets to experience innocence, even after she has experienced a life of decadence. This statement also highlights the complicated relationship Jocelyn has with Lou. Although he is her boyfriend, the way she hides with his son allows us to view her connection to Lou as a kind of corrupted father-daughter relationship.

What has caused so much strain between Max and Frank (aka “Leaper”)? Why can’t they understand each other when they meet again as adults in “Family”?

Jocelyn observes that she and Rhea are back in the same physical configuration that they formed as teenagers, the pair of them flanking the older man. Jocelyn describes it as a return to the beginning and this return is a traumatic one for her, as she is still struggling with the long-term effects of those early years on her life. We see in this return to the beginning, however, the effects of time. Lou, while still at the centre of the threesome, is no longer able to wield his power over the two girls, and the grown women that they’ve become are no longer subject to his influence. 

“But if it was Bennie’s good luck I was getting that day, did that mean my good luck was also his good luck? That my visiting him unexpectedly was good luck for him? Or had I somehow managed to divert his luck and siphon it away for a time, leaving him without any luck that day?” 

Scotty, the narrator of “X’s and O’s,” views his life as connected to Bennie Salazar’s. Having lost Bennie’s friendship in his youth when he began a relationship with the girl Bennie was in love with, Scotty seems to believe that his poverty and loneliness after his divorce from Alice are in reverse proportion to Bennie’s current wealth and fame. By the end of the novel, Bennie and Scotty have reconciled, and from that point on, they are reliant on each other’s good fortune. This sense that characters are connected thematically recurs in various combinations throughout the novel. 

“Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out” 

When Scotty decides to stand outside the building where a high-profile event is taking place, he feels excluded from the experience. When he stays at home and ignores such events, they have no meaning for him. Scotty draws attention to the idea that meaning is created by individuals, through shared experience. This statement also foreshadows his concert in “Pure Language,” an event people will feel privileged to have been included in.

“I let my lips open and stretch back, something I rarely do because I’m missing most of my teeth on both sides. The teeth I have are big and white, so those black gaps come as a real surprise. I saw the shock in Bennie’s face when he saw. And all at once I felt strong, as if some balance had tipped in the room and all of Bennie’s power—the desk, the view, the levitating chair—suddenly belonged to me”

When Scotty smiles at Bennie and reveals his rotting teeth, he effectively reminds Bennie of his own mortality. Because Scotty has embraced decline in his own life, he effectively has a power that Bennie, with his fear of aging, does not have. 

“Stephanie moved to the window. It was true; she glimpsed Noreen’s overbleached ponytail—like a caricature of everyone else’s subtly natural highlights—moving up and down beside the fence” 

Stephanie and Bennie are new to Crandale, and don't yet feel like they belong. Their neighbor, Noreen, embodies the role of Crandale wife to such an extreme that she makes obvious what the other women do subtly, thereby creating an anxiety in Stephanie that her own outsider status might be just as obvious. The satirical reference to “natural” hair coloring causes us to examine what constitutes real within this setting: the real Crandale women fake their blonde in subtle ways, while Stephanie with her dark hair and Noreen with her too-obvious highlights are both outsiders.

“I’m old, I’m sad—that’s on a good day. I want out of this mess. But I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away—I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art” 

Bosco, a former rock star who is dying of cancer, wants to embrace his death and turn it into a spectacle for the rest of the world to experience. By the end of the novel, we learn that he survives cancer and goes on to reinvent himself as a farmer. In this moment, however, he believes that by making an event of his death, he can create something larger than life. This is a further iteration of the idea that absence itself has meaning and character. 

“‘You can’t find a person who was not at that party,’ Kitty said. ‘And they’ve got proof. We’ve all got proof—who’s going to say were lying?’” 

Kitty Jackson is talking about “The Party,” a high-profile social event, where many celebrities were burned by a malfunctioning light feature. The event destroyed the career of La Doll, but, at the same time, became one of those meaningful shared events that everyone wants to be associated with. With this statement, Kitty explains that by inflicting similar scars upon herself, she has made herself a participant in the shared experience, even if she wasn’t present for the actual event. 

“There is something out of control about a star who cannot be nice, and the erosion of the subject’s self-control is the sine qua non of celebrity reporting” 

Jules Jones is interviewing Kitty Jackson for a magazine article and is dismayed to find that she’s a nice person. Ironically, in his article, he is the one whose self-control has eroded, and in this volatile state, he draws attention to the idea that authenticity can only be revealed when the individual’s personal boundaries are breached. In his desire to reveal a real Kitty Jackson—one that the public will pay money to read about—he must contrive a situation in which she is violated. This is another satirical statement about what constitutes real in the universe of the novel.

“Your throat tightens up and your eyes get wet as you watch their faces go from stony to sad, and it’s all kind of moving and sweet except that you’re not completely there—a part of you is a few feet away, or above, thinking, Good, they’ll forgive you, they won’t desert you, and the question is, which one is really ‘you,’ the one saying and doing whatever it is, or the one watching?”

Rob, the narrator of Chapter 10, is Sasha’s best friend and serves as a mirror to Sasha. This statement reveals Rob’s fractured sense of identity, where he separates his behavior from his observation of his behavior. 

“He passed churches blistered with grime, moldering palazzi whose squalid interiors leaked sounds of wailing cats and children. Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time”

Sasha’s uncle, Ted Hollander, experiences anxiety related to the passage of time. He observes how items of antiquity are passing away, losing their significance. That he regards the presence of living things— cats and children—as harbingers of decay, would suggest that he has more interest in the dead than in the living. 

“Mom makes sculptures in the desert out of trash and our old toys. Eventually her sculptures fall apart, which is ‘part of the process’”

Alison Blake is referring to her mother Sasha’s practice of turning objects from their daily life into art. For Sasha, this practice is a form of personal redemption, as she has redirected her compulsion to steal from others into a creative act that celebrates her own life. That she considers the eventual decay to be a part of her artistic process suggests that she accepts the effects of time on her life.

“She looks like someone I want to know, or maybe even be.”

Alison is referring to a photo of her mother she sees in a book about a rock star. Sasha refuses to talk about this time in her life. As readers, we know that during this time, she was unwell and out of control. Alison’s perception of Sasha, as she appears in the photo, is of a young woman she’d like to emulate. This reveals how varying perspectives provide different insights on a story.  

“Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she’d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside of quotation marks. English was full of these empty words—‘friend’ and ‘real’ and ‘story’ and ‘change’—words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks”

Rebecca’s study of word casings reveals a major theme in the novel, how meaning shifts with time. Rebecca has created a new word to bear witness to the passing of so many older words. This notion of time’s effect on meaning applies not just to words, but to objects—Sasha’s found objects, Bennie’s former house—and to people as well. 

“Time’s a goon, right?”

This statement is made twice in the novel, first by Bosco as he faces his impending death to cancer, and second by Scotty as he faces rebirth on stage. At the center of all the ideas in the novel is time, how it changes and renews, creating both anxiety and hope. The repetition of the phrase, uttered by different characters in different contexts, paradoxically creates a sense of consistency in the face of change.