A Visit from the Goon Squad Audiobook (Free)

Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging previous punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha hardly ever discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in romantic detail, combined with the secret lives of a host of other character types whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as mixed as NY, SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA, Naples, and Africa.

We first match Sasha in about A Visit from the Goon Squad her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in NEW YORK, confronting her long-standing compulsion to grab. Later, we find out the genesis of her turmoil when we find her as the kid of a violent marriage, then being a runaway living in Naples, after that as a scholar trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the concealed yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck within a lifeless marriage, who travels to Naples to remove Sasha in the city’s demimonde and encounters an epiphany of his personal while looking at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We fulfill Bennie Salazar in the melancholy nadir of his adult life-divorced, attempting to connect with his nine-year-old son, hearing a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house-and after that revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youngsters, shy and sensitive, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for stone and his present for spotting skill. We learn what became of his senior high school gang-who thrived and who faltered-and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, combined with the enthusiasts and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.

A Visit in the Goon Squad is a reserve about the interplay of time and music, about success, about the stirrings and transformations place inexorably in movement by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. Inside a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either get better at or succumb to; the basic human food cravings for redemption; and the general tendency to reach for both-and escape the merciless progress of time-in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating function in one of our boldest authors.