A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Like The Imperfectionists, this novel follows a great number of characters who are linked although not all of them know each other. The two main characters are Bennie and Sasha.

When the novel opens, we see Sasha in her psychiatrist's office, recounting a hair-raising scene involving her kleptomania. She thinks to herself that she will continue to resist her therapist's efforts to talk about her father, as she says to herself that only sorrow that way lies.

Bennie is a veteran of a punk garage band. It gave him his entree into the music busiess, as well as some emotional baggage left over from relationships in the band .. he loves Alice, Alice loves Scotty, Scotty loves Jocelyn, and Jocelyn falls in love with a much older record producer while her friend Rhea awkwardly tags along.

Bennie becomes the owner of his own label, Sow's Ear Records, and then an record executive when his company is bought out. Sasha is Bennie's assistant for 12 years. A remark Bennie makes at the end of the novel shows that while Bennie had some real affecton for Sasha, he never saw her. Sasha was, of course, stuck in every area of her life and getting fired by Bennie might have been the best thing that ever happened to her.

Egan excavates different parts of the story, spanning decades, in different chapters. She experiments with different ways of telling the story.

A friend suggested that one weakness of this novel is that the characters all have such conventional motivations for their actions: Sasha's kleptomania is motivated by her feelings of inadequacy caused by the breakdown of her parents' marriage; Bennie, and the members of his band, are motivated by their unrequited love, tearing the band apart; Lou insists on marrying a casual girlfriend because her interest in another man made him jealous.

But in Alison's slide presentation (a PowerPoint presentation telling the story of Sasha's family) Egan achieves an elegant economy of storytelling.

I liked the novel for a different reason: both Bennie and Sasha find happiness at its end.