Jennifer Egan is the author of the novels Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award., The Keep, and A Visit from the Goon Squad, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Published Date: May 10, 2013

Transcription

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the AWP Podcast Series. This interview originally occurred at the 2012 AWP Conference in Chicago. The recording features Jennifer Egan and Jessica Anthony.

Jessica Anthony:

I'm sitting with Jennifer Egan at the Association for Writers and Writing Programs conferences in Chicago, Illinois. Jennifer Egan is the author of The Invisible Circus, which was released as a feature film by Fine Line in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories, Look at me, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 2001, and the bestselling, The Keep. Her new book, A Visit from the Goon Squad, a national bestseller, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critic Circle Award for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize. Also a journalist, she writes frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Jenny, thank you for being here.

Jennifer Egan:

My pleasure. Thank you.

Jessica Anthony:

If you wouldn't mind, I'd like for you to read us a short passage from Goon Squad.

Jennifer Egan:

Sure. I'll read right from the beginning. This chapter is called Found Objects. It began the usual way in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. Sasha was adjusting her yellow eyeshadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman who's peeing she could faintly hear through the vault-like door of a toilet stall. Inside the rim of the bag, barely visible, was a wallet made of pale green leather. It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing woman's blind trust had provoked her.

"We live in a city where people will steal the hair off your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight and expect it to be waiting for you when you come back?" It made her want to teach the woman a lesson, but this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Sasha always had, that fat, tender wallet offering itself to her hand. It seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously.

"I get it," Coz, her therapist said.

Take the fucking thing.

"You mean steal it." He was trying to get Sasha to use that word, which was harder to avoid in the case of a wallet than with a lot of the things she'd lifted over the past year when her condition, as Coz referred to it, had begun to accelerate. Five sets of keys, 14 pairs of sunglasses, a child's striped scarf, binoculars, a cheese grater, a pocket knife, 28 bars of soap, and 85 pens, ranging from cheap ball points she used to sign debit card slips to the aubergine Visconti that cost $260 online, which she lifted from her former boss's lawyer during a contracts meeting. Sasha no longer took anything from stores. Their cold inert goods didn't tempt her, only from people.

"Okay," she said, "steal it."

Jessica Anthony:

There's an urge in fiction to be constantly inventing and recreating territory that we've already traveled. Do you consider Goon Squad to be an experimental fiction?

Jennifer Egan:

I never thought of it that way, and I am not convinced it's doing anything that hasn't been done before. I mean, not to run it down. I mean, I am proud of it, but I don't know if anyone's really written a lot of fiction in PowerPoint before. Maybe that's my one innovation. But I feel like whenever I arrive at what ends up looking like experimentation, I usually get there via a pretty old-fashioned route, which is really just the desire to tell a certain kind of story and the willingness to do anything it takes to get that story told. The one thing I do find as I keep writing is that I, myself, am not interested in telling stories that I've told before. As I look for more, I don't know, complex or rich or interesting things to narrate, I'm forced to look for unusual ways to narrate them.

That's really how I've ended up doing things like write in PowerPoint. I mean, the story that I tell in PowerPoint, interestingly, PowerPoint is obviously a cold corporate, not in especially evocative form for most of us, but the story that I tell in it is actually a very sweet, very sentimental family story that really wouldn't work in a so-called conventional format. I think it would be cloying, I think it would be boring. It's a family struggling. I mean, just the thought of writing a story that's just about that seems uninteresting to me. But somehow, PowerPoint let me tell that story in a way that felt a little more balanced, that the cold corporate envelope made the sweet interior somehow, I thought at least, not over cloying. It was a case of reaching for something that would let me do something I couldn't do otherwise.

Jessica Anthony:

The same kind of emotionalism, I think, is achieved also through the footnotes and the chapter that's told through an article about the celebrity. We're getting so much character and we're getting heart. I really found myself wondering if I was actually reading the first postmodern novel with heart.

Jennifer Egan:

Well, I don't know. It's funny. Postmodernism, if you just say that, of course it sounds very heartless. That's why some of this terminology ends up feeling wrong to me. In fact, this book generally seemed to elude a lot of terminology. As I was working on it, I always thought it's definitely not a novel. I didn't let them put novel on the cover of the hardcover, which is probably one reason it totally tanked, because it had no designation at all. People looked at it and saw a picture of a guitar and thought, "Huh. It must be a nonfiction book about music." I think I undermined the marketing effort, let's say. But in general, I feel like no label really seems to fit this book.

But I'm not a big fan of labels, period. I feel like I don't like the label chick lit. I don't like the label commercial fiction. I feel like all of it does a disservice. I mean, it's done for a reason. It makes a logistical sense and a marketing sense, but it erodes some of the nuances of what is in those categories. Postmodern sounds dry and experimental, but if that means being playful and willing to try whatever it takes to do something that feels a little different and fresh, then yeah, I'll call it postmodern.

Jessica Anthony:

I think I read in an interview you gave with Heidi Julavits with BOMB Magazine that you actually wrote a few of these stories, I think four of the stories earlier. I'm curious to know about that moment when you realized that these four stories were actually part of this bigger canvas.

Jennifer Egan:

I don't know if there was a moment, but it was an exciting revelation. It came out of having been writing some of the newer stuff for Goon Squads. I wrote the first three chapters that I wrote, which were not the first three that you read. At that point, I realized, "Okay. I'm writing this loose collection of stuff." In the third of those chapters or stories, as I thought of them then, this character from an older story, in fact, the celebrity journalist you mentioned who writes with footnotes, made a startling reappearance. I mean, when we last meet him, he's heading for jail, having attempted to rape his movie star subject. For some reason, it seemed really fun to me to see him after jail and to insert him into this family. I think there was a little bit of a pre 9/11, post 9/11 aspect of that, because I wrote that story in the late '90s, so pre 9/11.

I don't know, somehow it felt like bringing Jules back and seeing him in his post-prison life would be an interesting way of reflecting, in hopefully a lowkey way, on the before and after nature of that event, especially for those of us who were in New York then and still are. Jules reappeared. I found that really fun. That made me think of these other three stories that I had been pondering over the years thinking, "I don't like the fact that these four stories are homeless. Where are they going to be published?" But I don't really see myself writing another story collection. Suddenly I thought, "Maybe they all are part of this," which was a strange thought because they had literally nothing in common with each other. Not a character, not a stylistic choice.

They couldn't have been more different, yet, it was as if... I've used this metaphor before, but when I said it, I thought, "Yeah. I really was like this." It was as if these islands that seemed to be miles and miles and miles apart from each other were revealed to be all connected by one landmass, and feeling that landmass appear and emerge was really thrilling. But it happened slowly, and I made a lot of wrong moves in trying to understand the relationship between some of the characters from the past and the past stories. The more recent stories, I sometimes got it wrong and had to try again. It was definitely not seamless. It was lurching, but there was a sense of trying to reveal a shape that was, in some way, preexisting.

Jessica Anthony:

I'm interested in the fact that you just said the origins came out of this 9/11, this transitional period in America, especially in terms of the idea of fate in the novel, because these characters, to me, seem so faded. It seems like they're part of this larger human experience that we're all having in this moment of feeling adrift in this country. Is that something that you tapped into as you were writing or-

Jennifer Egan:

Well, I should just say I really don't believe in fate at all. I think fate is the narrative impulse. You look back and say, "Of course," it had to be this way," because we're storytellers and we're always looking for a narrative that leads us up to where we are, and we're so good at it. But I don't believe in fate because what I believe in is chance and luck. Now, I don't know, maybe that's another way of saying I don't believe in a damn thing. That's all I can hold onto.

Jessica Anthony:

That's the wallet though. The wallet itself is chance and luck.

Jennifer Egan:

I think it's all chance and luck. Starting with what kind of home and country and socioeconomic bracket you end up being born into, I think it's all luck. Actually, not all of it, of course. It's the interaction of those big strokes of luck with individual autonomy, impulses, personality, and that interaction is so interesting to look at. I wasn't really thinking about it so much in those terms as I knew that I really wanted to write a book about time. That was fairly explicit in my mind, really because of Proust. I mean, in a certain way, the book is an homage to Proust, who intertwines music with his ruminations on time at every turn, both as a plot element and as organizing principle in his book works very symphonically. I'd found myself asking, as I read Proust over years, how would you do this nowadays?

What would be a modern way to try to capture the sweep of time? But not in the thousands and thousands of pages of real time unfolding that he uses partly because he did it. That's just a straight copycat maneuver, and I didn't want to do that. I guess what I most wanted to capture was the strangeness of experiencing the passage of time, and especially seeing the passage of time in other people and other people's lives. Also, the strangeness of feeling time passed in one's own life, but I wanted to experience that strangeness in all different kinds of lives that also interacted. In other words, I was not explicitly not interested in the nostalgic vision that Proust has and that I think my first novel really has, where there's a clearly established present and there's a clearly established past, and there's some sense of longing in the present for the past, and that all hinges on a single point of view in time.

I really didn't want that, because there was no particular period I wanted to express any kind of longing for. I was more interested in the way that everyone feels that to a certain degree, for some period, which guess what, usually is the time around which they were in their late teens, early '20s. I wanted to avoid the specificity of one point of view so that I could capture the universality of that longing and shock and amazement. Also, the passage of time solves lots of problems too, and a lot of the surprises of time passing are actually happy surprises. I wanted to capture those too. Time is a goon.

Jessica Anthony:

What does that mean?

Jennifer Egan:

It's a silly expression in a way. The word goon is so goofy, but I think all it really means... It certainly doesn't mean that time passing is bad, because first of all, what does that mean? How can you argue with it? But it does mean that it always does pass. I guess in the sense that the goon is stronger than everyone else, presumably, that time is a goon, you can't beat it. But it also, it's a lot more slippery and elastic and strange in its movements than I think we often give it credit for. Of course, it infuses life with all of its preciousness. In that way, time is not goon-like, because I don't really think of goons as infusing their surroundings with a lot of joy and beauty.

I think one other thing is that a lot of people behave in a goon-like fashion at one point or another in the book, and also at one point or another in their lives. I think that's true of all of us. I mean, I don't know if anyone can look back and say, "There's no point at which I was a goon." We all have our moments of being a little more aggressive or somehow playing the heavy in a moment that feels maybe uncharacteristic or characteristic, but a phase that we move through. I guess I like that thought too, that everyone's a goon. There's there's no bad guy exactly. There's that way in which we all are the good guys and the bad guys as we move through time.

Jessica Anthony:

Thank you so much for speaking with me, Jen.

Jennifer Egan:

My pleasure.

Speaker 1:

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