A Visit From the Goon Squad v. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
presented by
ZOMBIE ROUND
A Visit From the Goon Squad
v. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Judged by Radhika Jones
Radhika Jones is an assistant managing editor at Time magazine, overseeing society and culture coverage. Previously, Jones was the managing editor of The Paris Review. Her writing has appeared in Time, The Paris Review, the New York Times Book Review, and Bookforum. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I reviewed Room and Skippy Dies for Time, and edited the Jonathan Franzen cover story.”
No need for introductions or exposition; you know these books already. No, to the zombie-round judge, it is left to critique and enthuse and advance.
Actually, my first order of business is to confess. These were two novels I meant to read last year and didn’t. My defense is that I didn’t get to read much last year, period, but I know that’s weak. This year will be different. It’s already different! Anyway, I was excited when they arrived.
I knew the conceit of A Visit From the Goon Squad, of course: The distantly related chapters that, taken together, tell the story of a guy in the music business and his assistant, Sasha, going forward and backward in time. Which is to say, I’d read the reviews and heard smart friends praise it and thought, OK, if you say so, but it sounds a little gimmicky, and what’s with the PowerPoint presentation?
Well, the PowerPoint presentation brought me to tears. But Egan had me from the first page. In the opening scene of the novel Sasha, a kleptomaniac on a date, sees a wallet in the ladies’ room and takes it. From that moment forward, the evening divides itself:
Prewallet, Sasha had been in the grip of a dire evening; lame date (yet another) brooding behind dark bangs, sometimes glancing at the flat-screen TV, where a Jets game seemed to interest him more than Sasha’s admittedly overhandled tales of Bennie Salazar, her old boss, who was famous for founding the Sow’s Ear record label and who also (Sasha happened to know) sprinkled gold flakes into his coffee—as an aphrodisiac, she suspected—and sprayed pesticide into his armpits.
Postwallet, however, the scene tingled with mirthful possibility.
I’ve never stolen a wallet. But I recognized immediately the gulf between prewallet and postwallet; the way one single action can change the tenor of an evening, an encounter, a life. Egan accomplishes this on virtually every page: She takes a small act and makes it the most important thing in the world, the thing that everything else is pre- and post-. And no comment is throwaway; later, for example, we see Bennie sprinkling gold flakes into his coffee. This is the kind of writerly confidence and consistency it is impossible to resist. I didn’t fall in love with Sasha or Bennie, but I fell in love with Egan’s writing. Then she made me cry via PowerPoint. Enough said.
FROM OUR SPONSOR
Aimee Bender’s heroine is Rose, a girl who, at age nine, suddenly tastes the emotions behind every bite of food she eats. If I had read Like Water for Chocolate (which I didn’t) I would probably describe it as an inversion of Like Water for Chocolate. As far as it goes, it’s a nifty idea. “Food is full of feelings,” Rose explains—a horrible thing, when you think about it. Through the lemon cake, Rose becomes privy to her mother’s discontent—and later, the guilty happiness she finds in a new love. She develops an affinity for a particular lunch lady, whose sadness is more digestible than the rest. She finds solace in processed food, untouched by human hands. And her heightened sensitivity makes her the perfect narrator for a family whose members are even more than typically removed from each other.
But in the end, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake felt like a very good short story that had a growth spurt and never recovered its center of gravity. I liked Rose, and I cared about her—I felt invested in her as a character—but ultimately I didn’t feel that she progressed very far. The moment in the novel that affected me most profoundly was Rose’s discovery of her brother Joseph’s mystical talent; it’s a deeply disturbing scene, and I was excited by that. I wanted that visceral strangeness to persist and develop. But Joseph turns out to be a dead end in terms of plot—he just disappears. (To be fair, that’s the point of his talent, but it’s rather unsatisfying.) And I wasn’t sure how to feel about the late-breaking revelation that odd talents run in Rose’s family. Maybe I got too attached, but I liked the idea that Rose really was special. By the end of the novel, her hyper-sensitive taste buds are reduced to allegory, her struggles and her brother’s shoehorned into a lesson about how much of the world we can tolerate. I felt like I was watching a novel foreclose on its own possibilities.
Whereas Goon Squad reaches out. It does so in ways that are poignant and disorienting, heartening and unnerving all at once, and it reminded me of my first existential moment. I was about nine or ten, in the backseat of my family’s station wagon on a summer night, driving from Cincinnati to New York. We were in Pennsylvania. I was looking out the window in the dark at the traffic heading in the opposite direction and it struck me that the people in those cars didn’t know who I was, and most likely they never would, and even if I were to meet them later in life we would never know that we’d passed each other on the interstate highway in Pennsylvania, and the world was too big to know everyone, and to live in it I would have to accept that. That’s what Goon Squad is like. You’re in the overlapping slivers of the Venn diagrams. You have to accept the slices of lives as they come. You have to accept the pauses in the rock songs described in the PowerPoint presentation and take it on faith that they matter.
What’s amazing is that Egan never loses focus. She gives you a galaxy of characters, each one capable of spinning off into his or her own novel, but you come away marveling at how economical she is, how efficient. Sentence to sentence, she never misses an opportunity to tell you something specific, and impart that specificity with meaning.
Advancing:
A Visit From the Goon Squad
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin: All this week I think a number of people have been anticipating a rematch in the championship, and now they have one—a duel infused with issues of hype and gender, a match between an old-fashioned realist novel and one existing in some sort of netherworld between the short story and novel.
John: It is the best of times; it is the worst of times for fans and followers of the Tournament of Books. I suspect that there’s plenty of people out there who would’ve liked to see a couple of upstarts get the best of the favorites (I think I might be one of them) but this matchup feels right. The “smaller” books in the tourney have gotten time and attention. Time for the titans to battle it out.
I know one person who isn’t happy about this matchup—Huffington Post blogger Anis Shivani, who has penned a multi-thousand-word screed on something the rest of the world already knows: that the New York Times Book Review tends to focus on literary fiction primarily published by the Big 6 and leans toward a certain parochial East Coast bias.
To listen to Shivani, even our humble tournament, with the inclusion of books like Freedom, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Room, and The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (which he called the “worst” novel of the year), is apparently perpetuating “the perverted groupthink of an empire’s intellectuals in the last stage of decadence.”
This sucks. I thought we were having a little fun talkin’ books and now I come to find out that we’re befouling the culture.
Kevin: That HuffPo article is an extension of one of the great genres of American criticism—the elitist masquerading as a populist by accusing something else of being “elite” by which he really means “not nearly elite enough.” Let’s call it post-faux-populism. It’s impossible to read any part of this essay alleging some sort of Eastern intellectual cabal in anything other than a William F. Buckley/Phillips Exeter headmaster accent. (Go ahead and try it with, say, “an occult hierarchy of values perceptible only to its elite cadre of editors.”) In fact, Shivani should start every one of his posts with the words “Ahoy, polloi!” It could be a thing.
But whatever. Shake the box up. So few people are writing about books at all that I’m not going to tell anyone who cares that much that they should shut up. Even if almost everything he says in the paragraph that begins, “What would be interesting is if the Times…” wouldn’t be interesting in the least, which is why they haven’t done it. Getting “independent scholars to assess the work of fellow social scientists” is hardly a recipe for selling newspapers. Criminy, the New York Times Book Review is practically the last newspaper book section left in America. But, you know, that’s the world as it is, as opposed to the world Anis Shivani would like it to be. Which is the whole point, I guess.
John: If we can make the world the way we want it to be, I would like C.C. Sabathia and Cliff Lee to be traded to the Chicago Cubs for three of the White Sox’s best players.
What Shivani proposes happens on a daily basis all over the country in the form of academic journals, which are rarely read, even by the scholars in the fields they cover. It would be interesting to see Jennifer Weiner and Anis Shivani get into a tug of war for which direction the New York Times Book Review is supposed to go.
Kevin: He at least gives some deserved props to Teddy Wayne’s under-hyped Kapitoil, which had the misfortune of meeting Freedom in the first round. We concur.
Now where were we? Oh, yeah. We’ve talked a lot about the size of the world Franzen creates in Freedom, but Judge Jones does an excellent job of pointing out that Egan paints a universe just as large—she only does it with fewer strokes and larger spaces between characters. It’s a lovely trick, and attempting it has tripped up many collections of connected stories in the past. Asking the reader to draw significant connections between distantly related characters in completely unrelated chapters can feel like a stretch. I don’t think it ever does in Goon Squad.
Judge Jones’s description of that first story reminds me of my own experience reading Egan’s book, where my expectations of the novel were constantly being challenged and recalibrated by each chapter in succession. I do think that is one of the great contrasts between our final books—that the pleasures of Goon Squad were mostly immediate, and the pleasures of Freedom were mostly cumulative. (Which isn’t to say that Freedom doesn’t have some wonderful sentences or that the stories in Goon Squad don’t add up to something greater than its parts.) We’ll have more to say about it in the recap/preview tomorrow, but for my money, and for reasons both internal and external, this is the most significant championship match in the history of the ToB.
John: I tend to agree with that, but I also feel like at times during the tourney, Goon Squad has gotten a little more credit than it deserves for its scope. It casts a wide net, but there’s also a fair number of holes—intentionally so. To be honest, to me, it never felt like a novel. The nods to previously introduced characters in subsequent stories at times felt like winks and nudges, rather than integral story elements. Probably most significantly for my reading experience, at the end of each story, I felt like I could put it down and not pick it up again. This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the subsequent material when I did re-engage with the book, but that experience feels a lot more like I read a collection of linked stories, rather than a novel.
In fact, this may sound like heresy, but Goon Squad was the second best story cycle I read this year. My favorite was a much less-heralded book by Frederick Reiken called Day for Night, a book that I don’t think ever got on our tournament radar.
Kevin: I’m not sure Jennifer Egan would call it a novel, either. For me it also transcended a typical story collection. When I was done with it I had a feeling that every chapter had been essential.
We also have to acknowledge that The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake was the big surprise of the 2011 Tournament of Books. It took down three novels that have passionate followers—something that I think explains some of the polarizing opinions that have been thrust its way over the last few weeks. Shrugging off the haters (and we can now include Anis Shivani) and winning again and again has earned Aimee Bender some badass credentials in my book. If there were a biker bar for book nerds, and in Los Angeles there might be, Aimee Bender should be considered exempt from the ritual hazing—which I only know about from Hunter S. Thompson books, but it sounds just awful.
John: I’ve been wincing at some of the punishment Lemon Cake has taken, even in victory, and want to say again that I personally enjoyed it. It’s easy to pick individual elements out of any book and find them wanting when held up for isolated examination, but what I remember is the feeling of getting absorbed in Rose’s experience, and I thought the relationship between Rose and Joseph’s friend George felt real and touching. In most of its individual matchups in the tourney, I would’ve chosen the alternative (including this one), but that’s only a testament to how positively I felt about so many of these books.
Kevin: I’d like to take everything you just said and pretend it was my own. Not that I haven’t done that before.
Tomorrow we have our tournament recap, plus the much-anticipated championship preview, anticipating Monday. Some very special guests will be dropping by with their predictions, and we’ll also be asking all of you to do some prognosticating of your own. I.e., a contest. Do well and you could end up with some sweet prizes from Field Notes and Powell’s.
John: Prizes! Also, in a surprise to everyone, including me, the Biblioracle will return for a brief, almost-end-of-tournament celebration. Look for details tomorrow on TMN.
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