TW Interview by Karen J. Ohlson
Here’s what it feels like to read A Visit from the Goon Squad: You finish one chapter, feel the stunned reverberation that comes at the end of a truly successful story, pause, then plunge into unfamiliar territory as the next chapter opens: “Who is this character? What year is this? How does this relate to…ahhh!”
When I first arranged to talk with Jennifer Egan about her 2010 novel, I didn’t expect we’d discuss male versus female writers or chick lit. I was full of questions about Goon Squad, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Critics Circle prize. It’s Egan’s fourth novel, following The Invisible Circus (1995), Look at Me (2001), and The Keep (2006).
Goon Squad stretches from the early 1970s into the 2020s, dipping into the lives of many characters—all with ties to punk-turned-music-producer Bennie Salazar and his kleptomania-troubled assistant Sasha—at both highs and lows.
It’s a vision of change over time and how we’re never prepared for it. (“Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?” asks one character.) We’re never prepared for it, but we keep moving forward—even though the chapters themselves move backward, then forward, then backward again. They also change in form, mutating among first-, second-, and third-person accounts—not to mention an oddly cerebral celebrity interview (with footnotes) and a PowerPoint presentation.
During our interview this May, Egan was informative, often funny, and extremely gracious—even when I asked her to talk about the recent Twitter flap she’d landed in because of an off-the-cuff comment to the Wall Street Journal.
In the WSJ blog interview “Jennifer Egan on Winning the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction,” she responded to a question about whether women need to be more vocal about proclaiming the importance of their books. Egan said no, they just need to “shoot high and achieve a lot”—but contrasted the idea of shooting high with the example of a Harvard student who had plagiarized “very derivative, banal” mass-market women’s fiction.
Those words provoked a backlash among authors like Jennifer Wiener and fans of that market, a segment sometimes tagged “chick lit.” (See “What We Call What Women Write” by Deena Drewis for a good summary.)
Egan regrets her original remark. As she told me, one of the most unfortunate aspects of it is that it didn’t lead to a discussion of deeper questions about gender and writing. Are male and female writers treated differently? The evidence is often anecdotal at best, yet Egan notes:
I’ve received a few emails from guys who literally have said to me, ‘I don’t usually read books by women.’
On one hand, I feel like, ‘Oh! I’m so flattered that you read mine.’ And on the other hand, I think, ‘Whoa! Wait a minute. That’s not good! For any of us.’
TW: Why do you think there was such a strong reaction to your comment in the Wall Street Journal among authors in the “chick lit” genre?
JE: I should start by saying that my comment was really stupid, ill-informed, and unfortunate.
TW: [Laughter]
JE: A few people have come to me hoping I would defend my remarks, but I have nothing to defend there. I deeply regret saying that. It was a thoughtless bit of easy judgmentalism, and people were offended by it, especially coming out of the mouth of a woman who had just won a major prize.
The takeaway for me from the debacle of my WSJ remarks is that there’s pain around the issue of chick lit and the degree to which it’s taken seriously. I hadn’t realized that the pain was there to such a degree. Now that I know, I need to think more about all of it. I’d like to help find a way to move us beyond the literary/commercial binary, which—like all binaries—is artificial, and therefore inherently misleading.
TW: I wonder if dealing with the literary/commercial divide is more treacherous for women than it is for men.
JE: I don’t know! I don’t know.
TW: Because you wouldn’t catch somebody like Thomas Pynchon getting flak for not being supportive of Dan Brown, you know?
JE: I don’t believe anyone was suggesting I had to support all female writers. I think what they were angry about was that I gratuitously insulted some female writers. And why do that, at that moment? It’s a very reasonable question.
TW: It touched a nerve in me because recently I had an email exchange with a male friend about writing something for TW. He said something like, “Well, I don’t know…you guys are all ‘chick lit,’ and I don’t know if I’d fit in.”
JE: Whoa!
TW: And I was like, “Chick lit? What are you talking about?” Yes, our staff is mostly women, and that’s apparent in what we write, but it seems the term “chick lit” has become a description of all women’s writing.
JE: The actual term “chick lit” is not one I really like, for exactly the reason you’re saying. It seems like a category that announces itself as diminutive. In other words, it seems like something a guy would say to diminish women. But, again, I know there are writers who write proudly and very successfully in that category. So, obviously, they don’t feel that way about it—or, I don’t think they do.
But I can imagine that you felt, in that moment of having him say that, kind of insulted. And it’s that sense of a slight insult buried in the very name that has always troubled me. I feel afraid, even as I say this, that my words could be interpreted as a criticism of chick lit. But, really, I don’t mean it that way. I am literally talking about the moniker.
TW: It makes me wonder if men are less inclined to read work with women characters, or with mainly women characters, or by women.
JE: I don’t know. One of those truisms that’s out there is that men tend to read books by men, and women are willing to read both. I don’t know if that’s statistically backed up, but anecdotally, to me, it rings pretty true. I’ve received a few emails from guys who literallyhave said to me, “I don’t usually read books by women.”
On one hand, I feel like, “Oh! I’m so flattered that you read mine.” And on the other hand, I think, “Whoa! Wait a minute. That’s not good! For any of us.”
TW: In A Visit from the Goon Squad, each chapter works as an individual story very well, but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. How did you envision that when you were writing?
JE: I didn’t have a grand vision of the book as I was working on it. It came about pretty inductively and intuitively. I was basically led through it by my own curiosity—not in the order that it’s in now, because I was moving mostly backward, chronologically. That turned out to be less successful than I had hoped, so I had to mix up the order a little.
I guess I had a sense of what it might be like to read the book. In a way, it’s one of the few cases where I feel that readers’ reactions have actually exceeded my wildest hopes. The gamble was whether this…combustion would happen, of all the chapters together. I think I had less of a sense of all the different parts I wanted than a kind of organizing principle, which basically consisted of three rules.
One rule was that each chapter had to have a different protagonist. I was very committed to not letting anyone be at the center more than once. The second thing was to make sure each chapter was technically different from all of the others. The mood, the tone, the feel—all that. And then the third rule was just that each stand completely on its own and not require anything around it for context.
TW: On your website, you note that some of the stories you originally planned didn’t end up in the book. Is that because they weren’t working as stories or because they didn’t fit with the whole vision?
JE: They were all dismal failures, no matter how much work I poured into them. I wanted to write a chapter in the form of epic poetry, which would have been incredible. But I don’t think I got past a page on that one.
One chapter I really failed at the first time was “Out of Body.” The second person is just a difficult voice to use. But even though I kept failing, I felt very, very strongly that I needed to find a way to succeed with it. Sometimes I allowed the failures to rest as failures, because in some way the world I was attempting in those chapters just didn’t feel essential. But with “Out of Body,” that moment—early ‘90s, in New York, Sasha in college—I was determined to nail that, so I just kept at it until I did.
TW: I know what you’re saying about second-person voice being really tricky, but one of the reasons I think it works in that story is because Rob (the narrator) is distanced from himself.
JE: Ideally, with any strong choice like that, it should not be possible for the piece to be written any other way. That’s pretty much the standard I hold to in allowing for what might otherwise seem like gimmickry. I can’t imagine Rob narrating a chapter straight up in the first person—it’s just out of the question! He’s too self-deceiving; he’s not comfortable with himself; he’s not comfortable representing himself. So, I think that’s why, ultimately, I was able to make it work. But it was a long road getting there, I’ll tell you that. [Editor's Note: “Out of Body” has been chosen for the Best American Short Stories 2011.]
TW: The book jumps around in time quite a bit. Did time end up being important in how you ordered things?
JE: I knew the book was about time. I knew that almost immediately. And because that subject is so amorphous and, in some ways, diffuse, it seemed appropriate to tackle it in such a polyphonic, decentralized way.
But, as I said, I was wedded to this idea of a backward chronology. Ultimately, I think, I was letting time dictate my structure too much. I needed to let go of chronology, period, and to not let time determine the order of the chapters so much as curiosity and payoff: What are the best surprises I can give to the reader? Oddly—sort of ironically—the time payoff was bigger when I let go of chronology altogether.
TW: Have you ever read Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar?
JE: Yes, I have. I didn’t particularly like it. I felt like the invitation to scramble the chapters seemed to reflect a lack of narrative drive. Or at least, that was my experience of it.
There’s an app in the U.K. for Goon Squad that has a shuffle feature. And I was adamant that there had to be a way for it not to be possible to use that until the person had read the book my way. Because I know that it does matter what order you read them in. When I read them backward, it felt flat!
TW: Well, even though Cortázar invites you to jump around among the Hopscotch chapters, he gives you a sequence that he suggests you read them in—which is different than the sequence they’re printed in.
JE: Oh, that’s interesting, I’d forgotten that. It was obviously an idea that was extremely innovative and ahead of its time. But I agree with him that there usually is an optimal order in which to read text, from the point of view of dramatic payoff.
TW: In Goon Squad, you have a “Side A” and “Side B,” as if it’s a record album. At what point did you decide to do that?
JE: I knew that pretty early. In terms of looking for models for what I was trying to do, a record album seemed like a more obvious one than any literary model I could think of. Because record albums, especially concept albums, are built around an idea of one story told in ways that are really diverse. And it’s those contrasts, going from the slow songs to the fast songs, that make an album great.
My initial thought was that the A side was post-9-11 and the B side was pre-9-11. If I had stuck with my backward chronology idea, that would have had a wonderful neatness and symmetry to it. Of course, that went out the window as soon as I read the book backward and realized it didn’t work. I considered getting rid of the A and B, because I felt like that axis didn’t mean as much any more. But then I thought, oh well, what the heck; it doesn’t kill me to hold onto that.
TW: This is a question my husband wanted me to ask you: Have you ever been a DJ?
JE: [Laughing] No! My God, no. I wish I were a music geek, but I’m really not. I pretty much just took that on for the purpose of this book. I listen to music, and I enjoy it, but I’m not terribly knowledgeable about it. And I’m not plugged into that world at all. It was my desire to connect with that world, partly, that led me to write this book.
TW: I asked that question because of the character in Goon Squad who is obsessed with the pauses in rock-and-roll songs. If anyone is attuned to the pauses in songs, it’s DJs. You think the song’s over and you start to segue into another song, and it really trips you up.
JE: I never thought of that.
TW: So where did the “pauses” idea come from?
JE: It came from a book that I read called So You Wanna Be a Rock and Roll Star by Jacob Slichter. He was the drummer for Semisonic, and they had a huge mega-hit in 1998 called “Closing Time,” which has a pause in it. He writes about the insertion of that pause and how important it was for the song. And as soon as I read that, the idea really…caught in me, and I couldn’t quite get rid of it.
Later, it became clear to me that Goon Squad is basically built around pauses—dramatic moments with these long gaps in between. Pauses are all about noticing time. Time seems to stop, and then it goes again, but now you’re aware of it. Pauses make us aware of time passing in a way that little else does.
For more insights into her creative process, check out the story-genesis anecdotes on Jennifer Egan’s website—click the place names and times (“East River 1997”) to make the anecdotes pop up.
We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?
—Jennifer Egan, “A Visit from the Goon Squad
