Jeff the Zombie
Popular Culture, Book Reviews and Everything
Book Review: The Operators by Michael Hastings
04 days ago
You may remember how back in 2010 an article in Rolling Stone got General Stanley McChrystal fired from his job running the war in Afghanistan. McChrystal and his team were presented as arrogant, free-wheeling and insubordinate, bashing the President, as well as the civilian leadership. I remember finding very little surprising about how McChrystal was portrayed in the article — but I’m a cynic, it’s my belief that most people who hold powerful positions tend to be burdened with hubris and incompetence. The fact that this is true, but is rarely reported in the media due to the cozy relationship between the power brokers and the court stenographers, is what really caused the firestorm. It wasn’t so much that Hastings’ story was true that upset so many in Washington, it was that he had the temerity to put the truth in print.
The Operators is a book-length version of the Rolling Stone article, covering the first few years of the Obama administration’s efforts in Afghanistan. And those looking for a hero in the story are going to have a hard time finding one. Even Hastings, the narrator and ostensible protagonist, isn’t particularly likable.
The war Hastings describes is one dominated by political infighting, with various factions hidden away inside their own insulated bubbles, incapable of recognizing the truth, or refusing to admit the truth when it conflicts with ideology. The Obama administration comes off as weak and ineffective, the Afghan government as corrupt and impossibly incompetent, and the American military as an isolated culture more concerned by its own inner workings and politics than whether or not it can achieve actual “success” in a country as thoroughly broken as Afghanistan (or even what “success” might mean). The media gets the worst of the criticism though, compromising its professional integrity in exchange for access to the people in power. The only people presented at all sympathetically are the individual American soldiers and infantry units who face the true reality on the ground every day.
It’s hard to come away from The Operators feeling like there’s any hope — not just for America in Afghanistan, but for our ability to accomplish anything substantial on a large scale. The dysfunction in America seems baked into our DNA, with political polarization and personal ambition overriding any sense of the greater good. Granted, this is just one person’s view of the situation in Afghanistan, but given that no one is treated terribly well, it’s hard not to believe that The Operators may be close to the truth.
Book Review: After the Apocalypse by Maureen McHugh
03 weeks ago
Maureen McHugh’s new collection of stories, After the Apocalypse, is not so much about the literal end of the world, as it is about the metaphorical end we all face. It deals largely with characters who have passed through their own personal ends and are now trying to survive in the wake of the worst possible scenarios. This includes a criminal dumped into a prison that is also a zombie preserve, a young woman trying to survive as a corporate slave after a bird flu plague took people she loves and a young refugee from a dirty bomb attack who has lost his mind.
Although I haven’t read McHugh’s previous stories, I am familiar with her work as an ARG designer (most notably, the trailblazing “I Heart Bees” campaign for Halo 2), and I put a lot of faith in the tastes of Kelly Link and Gavin Grant, the editors and owners of Small Beer Press. That said, this collection is not so much an assemblage of complete stories as it is a compilation of (mostly) interesting premises. Once the high concept of each story is revealed, the rhythms of plot and character have a hard time finding satisfying resolutions. The stories end, but lack the emotional punch or character insights that make the form so effective.
Still, one doesn’t read a small press book expecting a masterpiece (although Kelly Link’s own collections are by and large pretty perfect) — the small press offers an outlet for writers who are more experimental or unconventional, which are two areas where After the Apocalypse succeeds. Although McHugh has a great stock of ideas and clear skill with words, she needs to work more on the mechanics of telling a complete story. An ARG is all about the high concept, but a short story needs more. It needs to matter.
The Demise of Video Rentals and Book Stores is not the Apocalypse
03 weeks ago
by Jeff the Zombie
in Deep Thoughts
I am really getting tired of reading stories like this one from Salon, where the author laments the passing of the old brick and mortar order and eulogizes (and romanticizes) the shop clerk. Woe to that lost class of gatekeepers, who recommended so many books and records and videos to the ignorant masses. Farewell, to those fabled institutions of culture which provided so much for so many.
Seriously, get a grip.
The art house video store and independent book shop might have been bastions of culture for people in the big metropolitan areas of the country, but to me, as a kid growing up in rural Maryland, I didn’t have access to any of that. Independent video stores, which is all we had for many years, stocked the hits, but they also stocked scores of low-rent b-horror movies and pornography. If you were looking for art house films, or a lesson in the French New Wave, you wouldn’t have bothered to ask Cletus behind the counter — he wouldn’t have known what the hell you were talking about.
Similarly, we had two book stores in town — Waldenbooks and Coles. Essentially mirror images of each other, they sat at opposite ends of the mall, and stocked best sellers, romance novels, a smattering of science fiction, magazines and a spinner rack of superhero comics. These were not stores that stocked Pulitzer prize winners, much less Brett Easton Ellis. And if you ventured downtown to the used book store located across the street from the public library, you would find a place full of aging best sellers (mostly of the supermarket variety) and romance novels, which it conveniently sold by the pound.
And if you loved music, then you had several choices around town — Waxie Maxies, Camelot (both at the mall), and Kix, an indpendent store. Each sold a wide variety of top forty records, although Camelot did have a respectable “Alternative” section which carried bands like the Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, The Circle Jerks, the Misfits and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Ironically, the independent Kix was the least likely to stock indies, whereas Camelot had a respectable selection (for western Maryland).
And this is the way it was for many years until Borders came to town and brought a wider selection of books and music. By then, though, I had moved out to Washington, D.C., where a much more eclectic group of stores was at my fingertips. However, I think it bears noting that after the closing of Go! Compact Discs in Arlington, VA in the mid-1990′s, most indie records had to be procured through mail order services and catalogs, or by sending carefully concealed cash to record labels advertising in ‘zines like Punk Planet and Maximum Rock’n Roll. Going to the beloved Silver Spring store Vinyl Ink often resulted in disappointment — they rarely stocked the records I was looking for, whereas the late lamented Go! had everything I wanted. Of course, Go! went out of business.
Which brings me to my point here — the old order saw much of the country cut off from the flow of interesting art being produced in metropolitan centers. The only available music and books were produced for the lowest common denominator. “Cool” wasn’t just out of reach and inaccessible — it was completely unknowable. And Borders, for all its former greatness, had been run into the ground by people outside the book trade, a shadow of what it used to be.
Digital distribution is killing brick and mortar stores — not just devices like iPod, the iPad and Kindle, but also big online retailers like Amazon that carry just about everything. And this is a sad thing for the people worked for those stores and the business people who ran them, but is it a sad thing for consumers? Culture — art, music, books, film — is now available to everyone, regardless of where they reside in the country. It is no longer the sole domain of the coastal elites, but is available to everyone. Would a band like Arcade Fire have hit number one on Billboard before the advent of digital sales? Not a chance — no mall record store would have ever stocked them. But now everyone has as much access to Arcade Fire as they do to Lady Gaga. And that is a good thing.
With my iPad, or a low-cost Kindle, I can begin reading any book I want right now. It doesn’t require me going to a book store and hoping they have it in stock, hoping I stumble onto something, or hoping that a clerk will give me a good recommendation. I can research what people are thinking about it, and I can also contribute to the conversation. I think back to how I struggled to find contemporary literary fiction or obscure scifi titles at Waldenbooks — it’s all accessible. The same for film, television and music.
So instead of whining about how a few smug over-educated service workers have lost their jobs, we should really be talking about how technology has made access to culture a lot more egalitarian than it used to be. Good riddance to the old order, I say. Information and art for everyone.
Book Review: The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
04 weeks ago
For years, I’ve tried to get through novels in the post-human, post-singularity, “New Space Opera” genre of science fiction, but found each book a chore. Not so much for the arcane and convoluted visions of the future presented by the authors, but because of the lack of humanity in the post-human characters. I just had a difficult time relating to or caring for characters so distantly removed from us. Sure, I was impressed with the “big ideas” inside the books (see: Stross, Charles), but I could give a damn about the plots or characters found inside.
Given my history with the genre, one would expect that Hannu Rajaniemi’s debut novel, The Quantum Thief, would leave me feeling much the same way, but this is not the case. The Quantum Thief, while presenting a radically alien post-human future described in an obtuse new vocabulary, has the one quality his peers lack — humanity. Yes, his characters are post-human, yes they exist as software iterations of themselves, and yes they are far removed from us, but despite their change in form, they are still driven by desires and ambitions and fear and love and all the things that make us human. In effect, by turning themselves into gods, the inhabitants of Rajaniemi’s novel have become like classic mythical gods — omnipotence crippled by human weakness and emotional frailties, their human foibles ever more present the less human they become.
And no character is more flawed than the novel’s protagonist, master thief Jean le Flambeur, broken out of a software prison by a female warrior named Mieli and set on a mission by a distant higher power to steal something of great value in the Oubilette, one of Mars’ moving cities. Le Flambeur has lived so many lives that he’s intentionally forgotten most of them, but reclaiming his Martian memories is one of the key points the novel hinges on. There are so many genres at work here, and so many excellent characters and co-protagonists (such as amateur detective and student art historian, Isidore, and his MMORPG-derived girlfriend, Pixil), that it’s difficult to keep track of them all.
And as dense and challenging as the material is, the climax of the book and the amazing ride and fractal puzzle that unfolds is worth all the heavy lifting. The book is surprising, clever and deeply felt — easily the best science fiction novel of 2011, and the final pages only point to more to come.
Blu-Ray Review: Naked by Mike Leigh
01 month ago
by Jeff the Zombie
in Film Review
My first contact with Mike Leigh’s film Naked came with a series of soundbites that DJ’s at the University of Maryland’s college radio station had sampled and turned into station ID’s. These included several monologues by David Thewlis’ frustrated and angry protagonist, Johnny, including his rants about the coming apocalypse. This prompted me to seek Naked out on VHS, and I was both troubled and fascinated by Leigh’s film.
Nearly twenty years later, Criterion has released naked on Blu-Ray, for the first time giving me the chance to see the film as it was intended. I’m struck by the composition and stark cinematography — both of which hold up remarkably well, whereas many other films from the 1990′s do not. And although the film documents a very specific time at the turn of the century in economically-depressed post-Thatcher England, it is still very relavent today.
Naked centers around Johnny, a young man from Manchester fleeing the repercussions of an act of brutality that occurs within seconds of the film’s opening. He arrives in London, where he calls on his ex-girlfriend and her flatmate, developing a physical relationship with one as he longs for a romantic relationship with the other.
We then follow Johnny through the next forty-eight hours of his life, drifting through nighttime London and disrupting the lives of the various people he encounters until he inevitably returns to his ex-girlfriend’s flat. Johnny’s odyssey is at once satirical, tragic and so unflinchingly brutal that it becomes difficult to watch.
There is also a parallel storyline involving the owner of the flat, an affluent sociopath named Jeremy who is perhaps one step away from American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. Both Johnny and Jeremy are brutal to the women they meet, but are fundamentally different. Although the consequences of their behavior on the women they encounter is the same, their motivations are diametrically opposed. Without Jeremy, it would be impossible for the audience to have any compassion for Johnny.
Much has been made of Naked’s misogyny, but I think it’s important to understand the distinction between documenting misogyny and condoning it. Naked doesn’t justify such behavior, but lays it bare for the audience to see. It may not be pleasant, but it’s a part of human life that should be examined and discussed.
The film is in the middle in terms of getting the “Criterion treatment” — besides offering up a solid HD transfer, it includes an interview with American director Neil Labute (In the Company of Men) about the film, who has also been charged with misogyny for his own cinematic studies of the dark side of masculinity, a thirty minute interview with Leigh recorded for the BBC, a commentary track featuring the director and some of the actors, and the original theatrical trailer (which makes Naked look like a relationship comedy). The extras all help to enlighten Leigh’s motivations for making the film, but lack the “film school in a box” quality of other Criterion releases.
If you’re coming to Naked as a fan of Leigh’s other films, particularly those centered around family dynamics, I think you should be aware that this film is very different from his other work. It dispenses with his usual ensembles and almost solely focuses on a single character. However, if you’re interesting into delving into the psyche of one angry and embittered young man and seeing how he effects the people around him, then Naked is definitely worth your time.
Book Review: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
02 months ago
Ready Player One has been hailed as this generation’s Neuromancer and Snow Crash — though the comparisons may be a bit hyperbolic, it is undoubtedly the cleverest novel about virtual life I’ve read in awhile. Granted, Ernest Cline isn’t writing on the same level as William Gibson or Neal Stephenson did in their prime, but that isn’t to say that Ready Player One still isn’t a thoroughly entertaining novel.
The book centers on Wade Watts, a trailer-dwelling teenager living in the bleak year of 2044, where the planet’s resources have been spent, unemployment is rampant, and basically the only meaningful life to be had is in an online game called OASIS, which has grown to encompass every imaginary universe ever created and the Internet, itself.
The OASIS was designed by a misfit genius named James Halliday — a Steve Jobsian figure complete his own estranged Steve Wozniakian partner — who dies and leaves ownership of the OASIS to the first person who can find an easter egg hidden within the simulation. When the novel opens, some years have passed since Halliday’s death, and no one — not even the well-funded and totally nefarious IOI corporation — have been able to locate the easter egg. That is, until Wade makes an unexpected discovery.
What follows is an adventure story steeped in 80′s nostalgia and references, most of which are pretty obvious to GenXers who grew up on the periphery of geek culture, but may seem obscure to the general population. The pop culture references and the hunt for the MacGuffin are just the shiny outer wrapper, though — Ready Player One‘s strongest elements involve explorations of online relationships and the effects of living your entire life in a digital world, two very important issues given how many people today choose to escape their own lives for the comfort offered by online games and communities.
Although Ready Player One doesn’t meet the incredible expectations and hype, it is both brisk and enjoyable. It’s well worth the time of science fiction fans, gamers and 80′s lovers, alike, just don’t expect it to change the way you look at the future like Neuromancer and Snow Crash did.
Book Review: Axis by Robert Charles Wilson
03 months ago
Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin was an exhilarating novel, perhaps one of the best science fiction novels of recent years. It combined big ideas with a sweeping story and rich, engaging characters. The only other recent novel in the genre I’ve liked more is Neal Stephenson’s Ananthem, and that’s saying quite a bit. There have been a lot of undeserving Hugo winners over the years, but Spin was not one of them.
Axis is the sequel to Spin, and although it continues the story Wilson started in the original, it lacks its predecessor’s scope and does very little to answer the questions it posed. The cast is largely new, and we only get to know them superficially compared to the well-rendered cast from Spin.
Set on the alien world Equatoria introduced at the end of Spin, Axis opens with a woman named Lise who is trying to solve the mystery of her father’s disappearance some years earlier. Sadly, this thread more or less gets dropped as a group of radical Fourths comes into play. Their plan, as well as a new development in the exobiology of the Hypotheticals, serve as the lynch pin of the plot and is only tangentially related to Lise’s long quest.
Despite a strong opening, the book gradually loses focus and plot momentum — even Wilson’s excellent use of language doesn’t do much to offset the narrative inertia of the later chapters. The revelations at the end are neither surprising or game-changing, and we’re left with an unsatisfying ending that leads into the final volume of the series.
I’m still on board to see where things go, but I have to admit that I was very disappointed with Axis. Here’s hoping that Vortex takes the series out properly.
Blu-Ray Review: Tetro by Francis Ford Coppola
05 months ago
by Jeff the Zombie
in Film Review
For many years, director Francis Ford Coppola has been threatening a return to what he calls “personal film making,” a style of film he hasn’t worked in since 1974′s The Conversation. At long last, Coppola returns to personal cinema with Tetro, an intriguing examination of the relationship between fathers and sons.
Shot in stunning black-and-white, Tetro centers around a young man named Benny (Alden Ehrenreich), who has arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in search of his older brother, Angelo (Vincent Gallo). Angelo left the family some years prior and now goes by the name “Tetro,” taken from the clan’s surname. Benny and Angelo’s meeting prompts an exhumation of family secrets which leads both brothers to re-evaluate their identities. Looming over the proceedings is their father, a world-famous conductor, whose ego, success and fame has had a disastrous impact on his sons.
Though sometimes indulgent, there is much to admire about Tetro. It is no secret that Coppola is a once-great director who went on to make a string of weak films in the 1990′s that overshadowed the seminal films he directed in the 1970′s. He could have quite easily continued his retirement from film making and focused on his vineyard and other business ventures, but Coppola remained true to himself as an artist and decided to begin making the personal films that he wants to make. Because of this, Tetro is made without any commercial considerations — it quite literally is Coppola’s vision. As a result, it is one of the most unique films I’ve seen in quite some time.
Influenced strongly by The Red Shoes (which makes an appearance as a film within the film during a brief flashback sequence), Coppola uses surreal dance and opera sequences to underscore the emotions of the film. This, coupled with the vivid color flashback sequences, gives Tetro a dream-like quality that is both compelling and unsettling at the same time.
The Blu-Ray transfer is stunning and clear, though since the movie appears to have been shot in HD rather than film, it does look a bit too clean for my tastes. I very much miss film grain, which would have added texture to the presentation. The feaurettes provide a lot of background information on the film, but I was less than impressed by the commentary track, which I didn’t find very informative as the featurettes.
Overall, Tetro is an exciting return from one of the world’s greatest living filmmakers and well worth the time of any fan of Francis Ford Coppola, or independent film. The film may not always be perfect, but it’s always interesting and engaging.
Blu-Ray Review: America Lost and Found: The BBS Story
05 months ago
by Jeff the Zombie
in Film Review
It goes without saying that few studios would have the courage to produce a blu-ray and dvd boxed set featuring seven films representing the full creative output of a single production company. But the Criterion Collection is committed to film scholarship and preservation, so we have the ambitious release of America Lost and Found: The BBS Story, a seven-film collection featuring some well-remembered classics (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show), some forgotten films of the New Hollywood period (Drive, He Said, A Safe Place and The King of Marvin Gardens), and The Monkees sole big-screen outing (Head), all produced by the team behind BBS Productions. Yet as America Lost and Found makes the case, the creative explosion in American cinema that occurred in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s would not have happened if not for the contributions of Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, who parlayed their financial success with The Monkees television show into seminal film production company BBS. And as disparate as some of the films in this set are, they are all critical in understanding the success and ultimate demise of BBS.
First, it’s worth noting that nearly every film in this collection gets the full Criterion treatment — supplemental extras, commentary tracks and a first-class transfer to HD. Although Drive, He Said and A Safe Place are put together on a single disk, they are treated better than some of more bare bones titles Criterion has released over the past twenty years. The packaging is flawless, with each volume in the set receiving a cover based on the film’s original movie poster. In addition, a thick book provides essays on BBS and the films included in the collection. If you are at all interested in graphic design, this set is a real showpiece, especially when compared with so many dull studio blu-ray and dvd releases. At $70 (on Amazon), you’re getting each film for $10 — as most Criterion releases retail for $25- 30, this is an incredible bargain. Even with the weaker films in the set, it’s hard not to feel like you’re getting more than your money’s worth.
The set opens up with Head, which is overly indulgent and almost unwatchable. Suffice it to say, Criterion gives it a richer treatment than it deserves, including a stellar HD transfer and a full suite of supplements. Although Head is interesting in terms of its style and cinematography, it is presented as sort of an acid trip version of The Monkees television show, with the band members leaping from disconnected episode to disconnected episode. Except each episode is something akin to a nightmare someone had about the tv series. This description probably sounds cooler than the movie really is. However, the extras are very illuminating, particularly the documentary featuring director Bob Rafelson, who is unapologetic about his less than promising debut film. Of course, he has a right to be unapologetic, because he would go on to make Five Easy Pieces, one of the most important American films of the 1970′s.
Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider is a film I grew up very aware of, but never actually sat through in its entirety. My father was a fan and even taped it off of HBO in the 1980′s, which I always took as a reason to stay away. This was a mistake, as Easy Rider is a phenomenal film, worthy of the “classic” status it has held since its release. The plot is simple enough — two hippies, Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Hopper), make a huge amount of money on a cocaine deal, stow the cash and head across the country to retire in Florida. This brings the two across the southwest and the south, where they stay at a commune, pick up a Texan ACLU attorney played by Jack Nicholson, go to Mardi Gras in New Orleans and meet two groups of hippie-hating hillbillies. What could have been a glorious celebration of sixties era counterculture is instead a more somber examination of the counterculture’s failure to achieve the immediate cultural transformation they longed for. The supplemental materials do an excellent job of illuminating the creation of the film, and also allow us to see the creative and personal strains between Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda and co-writer Terry Southern. Laszlo Kovacs’ cinematography (arguably the first film to intentionally use lens flairs and other “dirty” camera techniques four decades before J.J. Abrams made them a cliche) looks especially amazing in the HD transfer.
The third film in the set is another I hadn’t seen before — Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces. In it, Jack Nicholson stars as Bobby Dupea, a childhood piano prodigy disillusioned with his life and his family. The film opens with Dupea working in a Texas oil field and living with his girlfriend, waitress Rayette, played by Karen Black. Bobby is incredibly unhappy with his life and holds Rayette in great contempt, but when he learns about his father’s recent illness, he and Rayette head to the Dupea’s family homestead on an island in Washington State. The film is stark and bleak, really investigating Bobby’s disillusionment and inability to find happiness. In many ways, Five Easy Pieces sets the tone for almost all American independent cinema to come, featuring an alienated loner trying to make sense of it all. The supplements offer a look at the many collaborations between Jack Nicholson and Bob Rafelson, and really put Rafelson into context as one of the seminal filmmakers in the American New Wave.
The fourth disc includes both Drive, He Said and A Safe Place. The pair are probably the weakest in the package and the least notable, mostly because they stand as artifacts of their era. Serving as Jack Nicholson’s directorial debut, Drive, He Said focuses primarily on the campus counterculture and a star basketball player, while A Safe Place is a largely incomprehensible and overambitious film about the psyche of Tuesday Weld. Neither are worth watching, although it should be noted that both transfers are as exceptional as the rest in the set.
Peter Bogdanovich’s classic The Last Picture Show fills the fourth disc in the set. As interesting as many of the included films are, this one is easily the best, surpassing both Five Easy Pieces and Easy Rider. Bogdanovich would go on to make many films after, but his career would never again see a film like The Last Picture Show. Following a group of kids stuck in a dusty west Texas town, The Last Picture Show applies a European cinematic aesthetic to a classic American coming of age story. The transfer is phenomenal — the black and white cinematography has made the leap to 1080p with nary a blemish to report. It appears that most of the extras are from previous editions, but if you want this film on Blu-Ray, this is probably the best way to get it.
The final disc is dedicated to Robert Rafelson’s The King of Marvin Gardens, a character piece focused on two brothers played by Jack Nicholson and Bruce Dern. Despite some stunning cinematography from Lazlo Kovacs, King of Marvin Gardens is not a particularly successful film. David (Nicholson), a Philadelphia-based late-night radio host finds himself pulled back into the orbit of his charismatic huckster older brother Jason (Dern). Jason has set himself up in Atlantic City and is working a Hawaiian land deal, where he hopes to open a resort. With him are two women — one middle aged, the other in her twenties — who both appear to be Jason’s girlfriends. He tries to entice David into joining his scam, but ultimately finds himself careening towards a tragedy of his own invention. The King of Marvin Gardens is definitely in the same mold as Drive, He Said and A Safe Place — two films that, while visually interesting, are not exactly comprehensible or engaging from a story perspective. Like the other discs in the set, The King of Marvin Gardens features a phenomenal transfer, though the extras are somewhat light — two brief featurettes about the making of the film, and a scene-specific commentary from Rafelson.
All and all, one could easily call America Lost and Found: The BBS Story “70′s Film School in a Box.” Not all the films included in the set are particularly compelling or worth owning on their own, but together they comprise an important archive that gives the viewer a much clearer picture of a critical turning point in American cinema, making a strong case for the influence of Robert Rafelson on the creation of New Hollywood cinema. Unlike Copolla’s failed American Zoetrope project (yes, I know all of his films were produced under that moniker — but the original idea of a San Francisco-based studio failed after THX1138), Rafelson and his associates actually succeeded in producing seven films and one documentary outside of the American studio system. Though not always successful, they were incredibly influential and would provide the template for the independent cinema revival of the 1990′s. Anyone interested in the fertile 1970′s should take a look at this excellent collection.
Book Review: A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
05 months ago
Perhaps it’s a result of when I read it, just following the death of my mother, but Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad had a profound effect on me. Few books I’ve read have encapsulated my hopes and thoughts quite so much as this one. A Visit From the Goon Squad is about middle age, about growing up and remembering the past — realizing how fleeting youth is, and how with age you lose track of the scope of time, and the past and present begin to coexist in the same space. It’s also about the web of associations we build in life, the influence of people we’ve never met on people we have met — and therefore, feel the influence of those connected strangers on our own lives. That if you follow the chain of relationships back everyone is connected with everyone else. Our mentors had mentors who are our mentors, too. And we just might be the mentors of their children.
The book opens on Sasha, a woman working in the New York City music industry who goes on a date with a man she met on an online dating site. From there, the novel spins out, bouncing from character to character as it spreads through a web of associations that begins and ends with Sasha. It crosses space and time, and loops back to that date and in the end you get an incredible sense of lives lived and lost, and the little things that connect us all together. Goon Squad celebrates a generation of young people coming of age in the latter half of the twentieth century — myself included, back when I was young — to whom music was everything, the very definition of cool and identity. It puts in perspective the fleeting moments of our lives when we went to shows, did drugs, drank and saw the future as limitless and full of possibility, only to wake up and realize our time as parents of small children greatly eclipsed our oh-so-brief time as punks.
In addition, the book is a scathing literary and cultural satire — at once hilarious and tragic, and un-ironically postmodern, ultimately terminating somewhere in the suburbs of a post-science fiction city built by William Gibson. You’ve no doubt read about the chapter written as Powerpoint slides — and as much of a gimmick as it might seem, it works brilliantly in presenting the anxieties of a young girl and her family. Egan closes on a future where social media alone can create a star, where the connections between people aren’t inherent and subtle, but are open and clearly graphed out on the Internet for everyone to see.
A variety of editions, including an iOS version, have been released, but don’t let the hype fool you — this is a really great book enhanced, not hindered by the marketing and well-deserving of winning the Pulitzer Prize. Of all the novels I’ve reviewed in the past two years, this is undoubtedly my favorite. I am so sad that I’ve finished it, but can’t wait to plunge back in to re-examine the associations I’ve missed.