Low-lifes living the high life (for a time): Visit from the Goon Squad

Fourth chapter - or story, if you prefer - in Jennifer Egan's "A Visit from the Goon Squad" is the very successful Safari, which first appeared in the New Yorker. As with the first three chapter/stories in this novel/collection, a thin thread ties one to the next - a minor or peripheral character in each story becomes a central character in the next, with minimal overlap of characters appearing in succeeding stories, a lot of jumping in time and place, not just from story to story but also within the stories. As a novel, Goon Squad doesn't have a true narrative arc (at least not yet), but it does have a unifying theme, in that each story is about the rock-music business, primarily from the business/producer POV - and Egan seems knowledgeable about this and able to convey quite effectively the crassness, the sleaziness, and the egotism of this world - a world of low-lifes living the high life (for a time, anyway). Safari is one of the more successful stories in that it does, as most great stories do, focus on a single event - in this case, an attack by a lion during a tourist safari, and how one of the guides, a washed-out drifter, shoots the lion and becomes a hero for a moment, thereby winning (for a night) the affections of the hottie who's accompanying the much-older record producer, Lou. Got it? That's a lot, and the story, as many of Egan's do, has way too many characters to keep straight, but following the main action it's a pretty good evocation of people in transition and distress. Many people will notice how in this story, set in the mid-70s, Egan jumps forward and tells us what became of some of the main characters over the next 40 years - kind of a cheap trick, if you ask me, unfolding a great deal of plot as pure statement, without earning it or developing it. But a worthwhile experiment - some may like it and find it convincing.