Jennifer Egan's not-so-new-book anymore—I bought it for my wife at Christmas, then in its sixth printing; it has since won the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—is about Time, the Goon. Time with a capital T. Time, redounding time, how it presses, and presses.
We meet Sasha, on a date with Alex, who we'll meet again, much later, at a bar in a hotel in downtown NYC not long after the Towers have been downed. She excuses herself—she's grown bored with Alex—and goes to the restroom, where she spots a woman's purse sitting casually unattended between the stalls. Succumbing to old habits—for which she is seeing a therapist, illuminating clips from the sessions seamlessly and hilariously interspersed as the scene plays out—she reaches down and slips off with the wallet inside.
Back in the restaurant, she soon discovers the woman, panicked, has a flight to catch in the morning, and is now without ID, a situation that might not have caused panic prior to 911, but certainly does now. To hell with her credit cards and money, she needs proof of who she is!
Alex, new to town, fresh, principled, not yet confused and disheartened by life and the City and to big tall growing skyscrapers blocking out his light, strikes out to help the woman. The concierge is called, and after a big fuss is made, the wallet is finally found—in the restroom, by Shasha, her nerves tingling, frayed with excitement and dread and, one suspects, the forces of transition. She returns the wallet to the woman, asks her plaintively not to say anything, tells her, candidly, that she's getting help for this problem of hers. The woman agrees to keep quiet—she has her wallet, her ID, a plane to catch in the morning. A subtle transaction has taken place. A real mess has been avoided. Sasha, whom Egan throughout the book skillfully imbues with quirky, goon-defying charms, without making her especially likable, is not one to go down with the ship.
Neither is Benny Salazar, Sasha's boss of twelve years at Sow's Ear Records (the book is full of similarly apt proper nouns). Their relationship, as hinted by the verb tense in the first chapter, has recently ended, but we are in book where time goes here and there (the book was purportedly inspired by the movie "Pulp Fiction," if only in the way the characters intersect through time), and so, in the wildly funny second chapter, we meet Benny many years earlier, a man full of energy and heart, who sprinkles flecks of gold in his coffee, a man with an immigrant's drive, unburdened by self-awareness, whose judgment and mojo appear to be slipping. A former musician of so-so talent (we will get scenes of these days as well, though not through Benny's eyes), he has been riding on his discovery, years earlier, of a band called the Conduits. Yet he continues to see possibilities where others, arguably for good reason, don't: in the "pure" (but possibly used up), even in a group of cloistered nuns (whose Mother Superior he is moved to, disastrously, try and kiss). Benny is one of those guys who can't keep it in his pants, who, pushing on in life, wonders what it might be like to "not always be wanting to fuck someone," and may be on the cusp of finding out.
Time shifts, backward. It is almost 1980. Rhea, one of the girls, the groupies, of the band The Flaming Dildos, narrates: " ... thank God. The hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they're begging on the street corners all over San Francisco ... We're sick of them." We will get echoes of this sentiment later in the book, a new generation sick of an older one, scoffing at their crushed hopes and dreams, and yet ...
Rhea is friends with Jocelyn, who has already made a tragic turn that isn't fully apparent yet with a man named Lou, who has an ex-wife and six kids and knows the famous producer Bill Graham personally. He came by in a convertible one day when Jocelyn was hitchhiking and offered her a ride. Jocelyn, we find out, is the same age as Lou's son, Rolph, who, turns out, rather likes Jocelyn—and Jocelyn, in a way more befitting someone her age, feels a tenderness toward Rolph.
In the "Safari" chapter that follows, possibly the best in the book (a slightly truncated version of which appeared in the New Yorker a little over a year ago), Rolph goes on a trip to Africa with his father and sister, Charlene—Charlie, she went by, back then—and another of Lou's post-marriage girlfriends, Mindy, who is attending graduate school at Berkeley and ends up in the sack with one of the safari guides, prompting Lou to tell his son later on, after the boy unwittingly reveals to him what has happened between Mindy and the guide, that "Women are cunts." It is 1973, or thereabouts, when Lou, then about thirty-six, shares this realization with his young son, a few years, still, before the young Jocelyn falls for Lou, before she is going down on Lou by the pool, where Rolph, from his bedroom, can see.
Years later, when Lou is dying, Rhea manages, through the miracle of Facebook and email and all that, to locate the old band and the gang—all but the "magnetic" slide guitarist Scotty Hausmann, who, once upon a time, had his eyes on Jocelyn, who ultimately settled for the relatively refined Alice, who had her eyes on him, who Benny, at the time, had eyes for—to come say good-bye to Lou before he dies.
There by his pool, home, once, to all those parties, that time has now made quiet, Jocelyn, in the kind of shape one can imagine given time, finds out what happened with Rolph. Hearing it, she finally cracks and wants to kill him, imagines dumping him and his bed right in the pool. Yet, to Egan's credit, Lou isn't made out to be a total bastard. Like any good son of a bitch, his point of view is compelling at times. He smiles at Jocelyn—that old smile from another time—and tells her, "Too late."
Comes the now seemingly derelict Scotty Hausmann (we understand, rather quickly, why Rhea hasn't been able to find him on Facebook), who, in another time shift, manages to locate Benny, seemingly at his zenith as a record producer, his Sow's Ear Records having been bought for big money by a large corporation for whom he still works. Scotty catches a big fish in the East River and takes it to Benny's office, where Sasha, working out front as Benny's capable assistant, deals with him—kindly, all things considered, and with mild amusement. The two meet in Benny's office, where the view, the furniture—everything—is spectacular, prompting Scotty, who is quite possibly unhinged, to ask Benny what happened between then, when he was the star who got the girl, and now ... between A and B.
Benny and his marriage to Stephanie, living the country club life for a while. Stephanie's brother Jules Jones, out of jail after getting a little carried away during an interview with an actress named Kitty, later recruited by the former star publicist for whom Stephanie worked—La Doll—now the disgraced Dolly, to assist in PR for a mass-murdering general (one must make a living, especially when one has a precocious young daughter who will save the day in the end, and marry one of the grandchildren of one of the 19-year-old warriors Charlie, Lou's daughter, got a smile from back in the early seventies on that safari in Africa). And there is Rob, at NYU, around the time of the first election of Bill Clinton as president, who doesn't look "druggy," who Sasha, after her time as a runaway, hangs with lest her step-father's watchers spot her with someone who looks less wholesome; Rob whose father was a football coach, who doesn't like football, who may like Drew more than he likes Sasha. Drew, a strong swimmer from Wisconsin, also wholesome, it would seem, though he smokes a lot of weed. Wants to be president one day—a joke is made about him inhaling—but he and Rob end up after a night high on X going for a swim in the East River, and something happens to Rob that, oddly, perhaps, a strong swimmer like Drew isn't able to help.
There is Ted Hollander, in a chapter titled, "Goodbye, My Love"—we are back sometime between 1979 and 1992 now—coming to Naples to find Sasha, who has been MIA for some time. Ted, who has "folded" up his desire for his wife bit by bit, kept his children out of his office, so that he can focus, think about, art, who believes, worries that, he is really in Napoli, in Italy, despite being paid by his niece's step-father, for the art. He finds, in spite of all his efforts, that he is not always thinking that much of art. It is the backstory of a man who needs, just this once, to be a hero—
A long storyboard of sorts follows, told, years later—in the future, like the ending, sometime in the mid-2020s—by Sasha's daughter, who, like her peers, isn't crazy about a "wall" of words.
There has been a baby boom following two wars, and the new demographic for marketers to chase are small children, some of them quite small. "Pointers," they are called, referring to what they do with their "handsets." Communication has come to resemble the babbling of infants. People tire of talking to each other, and ask if, instead, they can "T"—text—their thoughts, even when sitting across from each other at lunch.
It is a brave new world, longing, one finds, for counterpoint, something "pure," a great concert at "The Footprint" in New York City, that comes together by means not quite pure ...
But I have already told you enough—and yet I've told you nothing. I read the excerpt in the New Yorker and had no idea, until I came upon it, that it was part of the book. Yet everything fits.
I wasn't a great fan of, say, The Keep, and nearly didn't read this effort of hers. I'm glad I changed my mind. I liked it enough that I read it twice.
A great, timely story by a great writer that in my estimation will last.
Pick it up, read it, tell your friends.
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