Jennifer Egan's spellbinding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar an ageing former punk rocker & record executive & Sasha the passionate troubled young woman he employs Although Bennie & Sasha never discover each other's pasts the reader does in intimate detail along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs over many years in locales as varied as New York San Francisco Naples & Africa We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties on her therapist's couch in New York City confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal Later we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage then a runaway living in Naples then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life-divorced struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son listening to a washed up band in the basement of a suburban house-and then revisit him in 1979 at the height of his youth shy & tender revelling in San Francisco's punk scene as he discovers his ardour for rock & roll & his gift for spotting talent We learn what became of his high school gang-who thrived & who faltered-and we encounter Lou Kline Bennie's catastrophically careless mentor along with the lovers & children left behind in the wake of Lou's far flung sexual conquests & meteoric rise & fall A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time & music about survival about the stirrings & transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates In a breathtaking array of styles & tones ranging from tragedy to satire to Powerpoint Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; & the universal tendency to reach for both-and escape the merciless progress of time-in the transporting realms of art & music Sly startling exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers