Can we care about characters we don't like? A Visit from the Goon Squad

For Jennifer Egan's "A Visit from the Goon Squad" to work for me, she'll have to get me to understand and care about a group of people whom I would ordinarily dismiss as egocentric low-lifes and degenerates - and in the initial chapters she does a good job of setting them up as such, drug- and sex-addled leeches sucking the blood of the music industry, people with no talents other than self-promotion and with no loyalty to family and friends and no sense of purpose. They're comical, to a degree, and vividly drawn, but they are in no way appealing characters. Over the course of a novel, we would expect to get to know them more deeply, to see their vulnerabilities and hopes and fears, to know them in a way others, even themselves, hardly know them. A paramount example would be Rabbit Angstrom in the Updike novels, a guy few of us would ordinarily like but whom we come to understand and care for as his personality unfolds, and develops, over time. The problem looming in Goon Squad, as I pass the half-way point, is that, first, Egan seems to be going for breadth rather than depth, introducing many characters at the expense of examining any one in novelistic detail: it's a portrait of an industry and a way of life rather than of any one person. Okay, but satirizing the music biz pretty easy pickings. Second looming problem is that her satire, in Part B, is becoming ever more broad and noncredible, as we read about a minor publicist who takes on a despotic general as a client (hardly likely) and a tepid satire of celebrity journalism. Can Egan get this novel/collection back on track?