The Chicago Tribune wasn't incorrect on the dust cover "...as you watch them do what they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human". It's about falling apart, and coming back together. Sort of. It's about your anger at characters and your need for their redemption. It's about your own twisted ife and the leaving behind of who and what you thought you were in an attempt to achieve "adult", whatever that means.
A novel seems like an inappropriate classification. It's more a series of short stories, but even that term seems wrong; even if Egan did publish parts of the book individually before Welcome to the Goon Squad was published. Egan is brilliant when it comes to combining the twists and turns of the lives of multiple intertwined characters typical of a novel with the complete independence of the short story. This is something different. This is something awkwardly messed up to the point of almost beauty. I want to say awe, but that seems like too much.
I can't think of one, even slightly minor, character that isn't deeply, almost darkly, flawed, and yet complete perfect in and of that moment. Even Susan, Ted's supposedly perfect wife, who's allowed her self to be brainwashed into a sort of marriage coma so that the desire between herself and Ted doesn't consume them both. In her three minutes of airtime she says all the normal, expected, right things- but she's still off, still distant, still perfectly imperfect.
Nothing is so poignant, so aptly worth the pause as Alison Blake's slide diary and her brother Lincoln's assumed autism and subsequent obsession with the pauses, the silences, in songs. How it seems to physically pain their father as he attempts to understand what they mean, what Lincoln means. The direct abruptness of Alison's slides seem to change everything. The blank slides. The pauses. A family in a perpetual state of pause. Listening to silence, wondering what it means, what's there to be found- in the song. To them. It makes you wonder what the pauses mean to you- they start to take on more meaning before you get the chance to realize it. (To me- think "Love Love Love" by Of Monsters and Men. Pregnant pauses indeed).
The timeline is fucked. Annoyingly fucked. We start with Sasha in what we assume to the be the present, only to learn at the end that it was 20 years ago. And Bennie starts in the same place, only to go backwards 15 years, then fast forward another 20 by the end. At the same time, other than my general issues with continuity, it doesn't really matter. This cross between the novel and short story doesn't leave a whole lot of room for timelines and continuity to matter much more than being a slight annoyance. The same humanity exists whether or not you know when on the timeline things are happening. The same feeling of giving up on something to gain another and feeling lost in the process is still there.
Welcome to the Goon Squad isn't something to read when you need to figure out where you're going. All it can possible do is help remind you where you've been and that you have no idea what or who you are now. It's about always feeling lonely around other people and getting over it. It's about feeling off in your own skin and pretending you're over it.
It all seems so incredibly apt.
I'm sure I'm supposed to be writing about the more technical aspects of the book: the structure, the plot, what it says about society as a whole, theme- blah blah blah. But I'm the one that's supposed to be reading with the heart and not the head (or so I've decided). I underline things in books not only because the phrasing is interesting and I want to get it stuck in my head, but so that I can remember that I felt something trigger when I read it. It's not about what it's supposed to mean in the overall context of the narrative- it's about what it feels like. What I know something feels like.
I'm not terribly surprised that it won the Pulitzer. Its format is experimental enough without sacrificing meaning, story or good writing. The characters are tragically flawed and looking for redemption- always a good formula for Pulitzer. The stories are accessible enough to draw you in, but obtuse enough to make you question what Egan real intentions were. Everything is sort of muddy and warm- enveloping you in an uncomfortable sense of foreboding and hope.
I can never quite tell if I read too much into these things or not enough. We all ascribe different meanings to different things. I'm sure this book would have read differently if I had finished it in the same headspace as I had started it. I guess that says something about reading things in one sitting- there is no time to change, the book can't change that quickly. You can't change that quickly.
Then again, nothing is good if you can't relate. Right?
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