Still, Bennie isn't happy with the music he's producing: "Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust! Bennie knew better than to say these things aloud."
We follow Bennie back to his teenage years as a mohawked punk musician in San Francisco, moshing at the Mabuhay Gardens.
We even venture with him into the future, where marketing is almost exclusively viral and music is promoted by word of tweet to an alarmingly young target audience.
Here is the office worker of tomorrow: "Lulu was in her early twenties, a graduate student at Barnard and Bennie's full-time assistant: a living embodiment of the new 'handset' employee: paperless, deskless, commuteless, and theoretically omnipresent, though Lulu appeared to be ignoring a constant chatter of handset beeps and burps."
Bennie and his travails are but a small part of A Visit from the Goon Squad. The book shifts constantly over four decades and among a daunting cast of characters, most of whom have some connection, however tenuous, to the music business and to each other. The primary relationship for the majority of these people is with their psychiatrist.
Egan, a 1985 University of Pennsylvania graduate and author of the much-praised novel The Keep (2006), introduces us to the burnouts, the sellouts, and the emotionally handicapped. Her focus is on the energy, recklessness, and vanity of youth. But she offers snapshots of her large cast in many stages of their lives, even dotage.
