Can you provide a summary of A Visit from the Goon Squad?
There are thirteen stories told in this book, which makes for a very difficult summary. This is especially true because each of the thirteen stories is narrated by a different character.
The book follows a large cast of mostly self-destructive characters as they grow older and fate sends them in directions they did not intend to go.
However, focusing on the two most prominent characters in the book, we can summarize A Visit from the Goon Squadas follows.
Sasha is introduced as a person in therapy for compulsive stealing. She is in her thirties at this point, works for Bennie Salazar at a record label, and lives in New York City. In her past, Sasha was a pickpocket in Naples, Italy after running away from home at the age of seventeen.
She returns to the US and enrolls at university in New York, meets Bennie at a Conduits concert, and lands...
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a job with him. She spends years working at the record label, making no attempts to move up to become an executive. Sasha helps Bennie navigate his divorce to some extent and politely brushes him off when he desparately announces his love for her.
Later, she gets married to Drew, the boyfriend who was partially responsible for the drowning death of her suicidal best friend Rob when she was in college. She and Drew move to California and have two kids, Alison and Lincoln. Lincoln is slightly autistic.
Bennie Salazar was raised in California and loved music. He is introduced to a music mogul who is dating a friend of his when he (and his friend) is still in high school. Bennie plays bass guitar in a band that is not quite passable and he plays poorly. His interest in music and the music business, however, is passionate. Upon meeting the music mogul, Bennie launches his career in music, eventually becoming a wealthy music mogul himself.
Bennie marries Stephanie, has a child with her, and moves into a ritzy neighborhood outside of New York City. He is looked at with suspicion in the close-knit neighborhood while Stephanie finds ways to integrate herself.
They are divorced after Stephanie realizes that Bennie has slept with her tennis partner as a way to get revenge. Bennie then has awkward and often disappointing visits with his son.
Eventually Bennie remarries and has another child.
What are the themes in A Visit from the Goon Squad?
A number of themes are presented in this novel. The most prominent theme relates to the notion that individuals are shaped by personal history in ways that allow that history to continue shaping us long after it has passed.
The "goon" of the novel's title is time, as stated by one of the characters near the middle of the book.
"Time's a goon, right?", referring to the way that time and fate cruelly rob most of the book's characters of their youth, innocence and success.
The central characters in the narrative are engaged in a negotiation with personal history, from Sasha and Bennie to Rob and even the child Alison.
Sasha offers the clearest example of this negotiation as she struggles to overcome a history of compulsive petty theft. She does finally manage to do this and eventual gets married. In her marriage, she continues to recall and to relate to her past as if it has a dynamic and potent life of its own.
With attempted suicide in her past, Sasha is a bit like Bennie, a man haunted by a period of his life that he cannot regain and which seems to act like a poison to him, for reasons that are difficult to surmise. He is visited by his former friend Scotty one day and is unsettled by the meeting. The past, for Bennie, is also alive and potent.
Some lesser themes of the novel deal with ideas of people being drawn to like-minded people, the future being present in seed form in the current moment, and music being a poor shelter for angry, broken-hearted people as well as a dream that can be fulfilled.