82 pages • 2 hours read
Jennifer EganA Visit from the Goon Squad
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 12-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part B
Chapter 12 Summary: Great Rock and Roll Pauses
It is sometime in the 2020s. Alison Blake, who narrates this chapter in the form of a graphic slide show journal entry, is Sasha’s daughter. Sasha is now married to Drew, and they have two children: Alison, aged twelve, and Lincoln, aged thirteen. They live in the desert. Lincoln is interested in the pauses in rock songs, sampling these pauses and playing them in loops to create his own music. Drew is a doctor, and everyone considers him a “good man” (248), although he is rarely at home with his family and has difficulty relating to Lincoln. Sasha likes to make sculptures out of “trash and our old toys” (242). Alison is curious about her mother’s past, because of a photo of her in a book about a rock and roll star, but Sasha doesn’t like to talk about that time in her life. Drew has told Alison about Rob, her mother’s best friend who drowned in college, and whom Drew tried to rescue but couldn’t.
One night, Drew arrives home from work in a bad mood. When Lincoln plays his music, composed of pauses, Drew gets frustrated and yells at him. Sasha comes to Lincoln’s defense. When Drew tries to comfort Lincoln, he runs into his room and Sasha follows him. Drew and Alison go for a walk in the desert in the dark. They walk out to the solar panels Alison usually sees in the distance, and she grows tired on the long walk back to the house. They talk about Lincoln, how Drew has difficulty relating to him, and Alison suggests that Drew help Lincoln to make graphs of the musical pauses he is so interested in. By the time they get back to the house, Alison has a brief anxiety attack, in which she fears that she may have travelled into the future and that her home will have disappeared. Discovering it all intact, she goes to bed, where she hears her father talk to Lincoln about the silence in the desert. In the final slides of her journal, Alison posts the graphs that her father makes for Lincoln.
Chapter 13 Summary: Pure Language
Bennie convinces Alex—Sasha’s date in Chapter 1—to take on a project of covert social network marketing. Bennie is now almost 60 and has a young wife and “pointer” (the new word for toddler, a marketing demographic, capable of purchasing online simply by pointing). Bennie has been producing analog-style music since being fired by Sow’s Ear records many years earlier, and is currently trying to market Scotty Hausmann to this new “pre-verbal” (313) demographic. Alex is reluctant to tell his wife about the job, because of the stigma associated with social network marketing.
Alex meets with Lulu, a grad student and Bennie’s assistant, to discuss the project. Alex tells her that he feels like a sell-out for taking this job, while Lulu says she believes ethics to be an antiquated concept. Lulu begins to communicate with Alex via text message, even though they are sitting at a table together, because “It’s pure—no philosophy, no metaphors, no judgments” (321). Alex’s daughter Cara-Ann sees the hand device and asks for it. Lulu sends Cara-Ann a picture of a lion via text, and although he and his wife have an agreement not to let her use one until she turns five, he shows her the image from Lulu. Later, when Alex’s wife Rebecca notices that Cara-Ann wants to play with the hand device, Alex doesn’t tell her that Lulu was the reason he let her use it.
Alex, Rebecca, and Cara-Ann attend Scotty’s outdoor concert, ostensibly because Rebecca has been hearing about it from her friends online, which Alex knows to be the result of his marketing. When they get to Washington Square, the venue is packed. Alex receives a text from Lulu asking for help and goes backstage to find Scotty, “a shell whose essence had vanished” (332), having an attack of stage fright. Bennie reminds Scotty of how he had found him down by the river after Stephanie left him and Sow’s Ear fired him. Finally Lulu arrives and Scotty agrees to let her escort him to the stage. He plays his planned set of songs for children, then switches to darker, more raw material, “songs he’d been writing for years underground” (335). The concert becomes a historical event. Walking home after the show, Bennie and Alex pass by the building where Sasha used to live, they ring her buzzer, but nobody answers.
Chapters 12-13 Analysis
Chapters 12 and 13 are both set in the future, sometime in the 2020s, and return to Sasha and Bennie, both of whom are enjoying satisfying but complicated lives. In Chapter 12, Sasha has all but forgotten her troubled past, has married Drew, and is now raising two children. Her compulsion to steal from people has evolved into an art practice using “found objects” (265). In Chapter 13, Bennie has experienced career and relationship collapses, but is now in a new marriage and is building a new career. Bennie and Scotty emerge as a narrative pair, as we see the arc from their youthful falling out to the reconciliation that becomes their mutual rebirth.
Both chapters address the dynamic nature of language. In “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” Sasha is perplexed by Alison’s tendency to record her thoughts in the form of graphic slides, asking, “Why don’t you write?” (253). Alison responds by showing her the direction she is given in school, which encourages visual presentation and discourages the use of a “word-wall” (254). In “Pure Language,” Rebecca, a scholar, has coined the term “word casings” (323), to describe words which have lost their meanings; in doing so, she has created a new word that bears witness to the passing away of old words. This observation of how the new emerges from the old is the essential focus of A Visit from the Goon Squad.
Egan challenges the meanings of words throughout the novel, but nowhere so pointedly as in “Pure Language,” with her many uses of the word “star.” The hand device used by children is known as the Starfish. Rebecca, in her groundbreaking work with language change, is identified as an “academic star” (323). And of course, Bennie is determined to make Scotty a rock and roll star. The word “star,” used in so many different contexts, always gestures toward the original, literal meaning of a celestial body, but at the same time reminds us of the changeable nature of words. In keeping with the musical nature of the novel’s form, the repetition of the word serves as a steady beat underneath the changing music.
The end of “Pure Language” marks a return to the beginning of the novel, as Bennie and Alex pass the building where Sasha used to live. In Alex’s attempt to reconstruct his memory of the night he went to her apartment, and in Bennie’s comment that he “ hope[s] she found a good life . . . She deserved it” (339), we feel a sense of resolution, a reassurance that Sasha, who in Chapter 1 is determined to get better, does indeed experience the transformation she desires. The act of remembering Sasha, an act of nostalgia, also reveals that Bennie has made peace with the idea of growing older and has thus found his own resolution.
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