Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction

ISSN: 0011-1619 (Print) 1939-9138 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/vcrt20

Found time: Kairos in A Visit from the Goon Squad

Melissa J. Strong

To cite this article: Melissa J. Strong (2018) Found time: Kairos in A Visit from
the Goon Squad, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 59:4, 471-480, DOI:
10.1080/00111619.2018.1427544

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2018.1427544

Published online: 31 Jan 2018.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 2427

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=vcrt20
CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION
2018, VOL. 59, NO. 4, 471–480
https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2018.1427544

Found time: Kairos in A Visit from the Goon Squad

Melissa J. Strong
English Department, Community College of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
A Visit from the Goon Squad conceives of time as a brutalizing force. Passing Temporality; narrative;
years ravage characters who wonder where time went. Time is central to postmodernism; post-
the story and to the nonlinear way Jennifer Egan tells it, with thirteen postmodernism
chapters alternating perspectives and shifting between past, present, and
future. Much of the scholarship on the book to date addresses its negative
treatment of time. However, this essay argues that time is not always rough
in Goon Squad. Hopeful opportunities emerge during disruptions to linear
narrative and challenges to measurable clock time. Approaching the novel
through the lens of kairos time—Paul Tillich’s term for the possibility of the
eternal—uncovers opportunities for wholeness and healing in a work fre-
quently characterized as hopeless and near dystopian. Kairos fosters human
connections, links younger and older selves, and offers possibility to char-
acters who fear time is running out.

Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit
from the Goon Squad (2010) conceives of time as a brutalizing force. The title comes from dialogue
in the seventh chapter, “A to B”: “Time’s a goon, right? Isn’t that the expression?” (127). Time is
central to the story and to the nonlinear way Egan tells it, with thirteen chapters that address the
perspectives of thirteen characters and also shift between past, present, and future. Reviewers called
Goon Squad “formally daring” (Cooke), a “collage” (Bastian), and a “mash-up” (Blythe) with
Dickensian scope (Neary) and dystopian features (Maslin). Much of the scholarship on the book
addresses its negative or wistful treatment of time. David Cowart reads the novel as a cautionary tale
of passing time (241–42). Danica van de Velde interprets the rock-and-roll pauses at the center of
the twelfth chapter as a metaphor for “all that is lost in the passage of time” (123). Gerard Moorey
argues that the novel reflects the end of the rock-and-roll era (65). Katherine D. Johnston approaches
Goon Squad as a metafiction for the digital era (158–59). And Martin Moling situates it within a
literary tradition of characters pining for their lost youth and questing to delay death (53–54). Music
serves as a catalyst for remembering expired glory; van de Velde observes that “soundtracking”
memory reflects characters’ “nostalgic longing” (124). We see this in the nostalgia record executive
Bennie Salazar feels for the 1970s punk scene, and in the longing his mentor Lou feels for the power
and privilege he enjoyed as a successful producer during rock’s golden age. As Moling puts it, Egan’s
characters “pine to recapture the innocent, carefree, and blissful moments of their younger
days” (54).
But time is not always as rough as a goon squad’s ruthless thugs. Amid the themes of flux and
loss, Goon Squad raises possibilities hiding like the hope at the bottom of Pandora’s box. Hopeful
opportunities emerge during Goon Squad’s disruptions to linear chronology. Temporal shifts in the
narrative present scenes out of order, with conspicuous gaps in between. Moling calls this “punk
time,” an evasion of “straightforward narrative chronology” that “subvert(s) the passage of time”
(65). He connects punk time to punk rock, a movement characterized by negativity. Punk rejected

CONTACT Melissa J. Strong mstrong@ccp.edu English Department, Community College of Philadelphia, 1700 Spring
Garden Street, Philadelphia, PA 19130, USA.
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
472 M. J. STRONG

counterculture idealism, replacing it with disenchantment, destruction, and hopelessness.1 The

goons of time in Egan’s novel suggest punk rockers: brutal, violent, and desultory (Moling 52).
Goon Squad evokes punk music’s feelings of discontent, striving for authenticity, and rejection of
expectations. But it also promotes creation, just as punk did through devising new aesthetics in
music and fashion. In Moling’s interpretation, punk time offers potential for connection, “reflecting
Egan’s attempt to bridge the past and the future, or modernism and postmodernism” (53).
Additionally, Goon Squad’s challenges to measurable clock time, or chronos, foster connections
between characters and link characters’ past, present, and future selves. Most important, kairotic
time—an alternative to chronos—offers hope and reinvention to Egan’s characters when they fear
time running out.
Approaching the novel through the lens of kairos time uncovers opportunities for wholeness and
healing in a work frequently characterized as hopeless and near dystopian. Kairos refers to the
possibility of the eternal—“what ought to be”—interrupting the limitations of the present moment
(Pauck and Pauck 73). The term is a concept from the New Testament that Paul Tillich, the
philosopher and theologian, reinterpreted in response to the cultural breakdowns of modernity.
The breakdowns Tillich recognized beginning in the 1940s reemerged in 1970s punk music. For
example, the repetition of “No future, no future, no future” in the Sex Pistols’ iconic “God Save the
Queen” (1977) portrays “a bleak outlook” that “fervently den[ies] any future” (Moling 64–65).
Released during the Silver Jubilee celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s
accession to the throne, the song insistently denies the jubilee’s celebration of achievement and its
optimism for the future. It even denies the queen’s humanity with the lyric “She ain’t no human
being.” Instead, kairos envisions what should be breaking into the present moment, so that “some-
thing new” emerges “out of old and dying conditions” (Pauck and Pauck 73). Goon Squad contains
the hope and possibility of kairos absent in “God Save the Queen” and punk music. Kairos helps
Sasha and her daughter Alison connect with themselves and others, and it prompts them to create.
Kairos also provides a means of uniting a fragmented narrative composed of disparate elements
including tabloid and music journalism, social media slang, speculative fiction, and PowerPoint
slides.
Goon Squad engages with time as both chronos and kairos. Chronos time is familiar and easily
understood. In contrast, kairos time is complex and variable; it is not linear or measurable. Tillich
discusses kairos in relation to Christianity, epistemology, and lived experience. This last application
of kairos to the late twentieth century, which Tillich calls “our present situation” of “a secularized
and emptied autonomous culture,” pertains to Egan’s novel (Protestant 43). Its temporal settings
include the second half of the twentieth century, the early twenty-first century, and the near future,
cultures “emptied” out by forces Tillich perceived in the late 1960s as well as other phenomena yet to
occur. The digital revolution, the downfall of the record industry, the rise of social media, and
aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks figure prominently into Goon Squad, creating a culture of
fragmentation that parallels what David Cowart calls the “absolute fragmentation” of literary
postmodernism (245).
This environment is ideal for an exploration of kairos, and Goon Squad riffs on the concept. New
beginnings can take place when the eternity of kairos interrupts the temporality of chronos. However,
struggle is necessary for such possibilities to arise, in Tillich’s view (History 534). Tillich defines
kairos as the “right time,” pointing out that this varies depending on circumstances and situation
(History 1). People experience kairos individually, recognizing the time to act. That time occurs
when we have the wisdom and maturity to “make the decision,” at which point we also feel the “right
time” has arrived (Tillich, History 1). In classical rhetoric, kairos functions on one level “as justice or
the proper measure according to merit or what is ‘due’ to an individual in an order of equality”
(Smith 56). In Egan’s novel, Sasha achieves the justice or redemption of kairos when she stops
fighting chronos. In the process, Sasha demonstrates the self-awareness associated with kairos in
therapeutic psychology, which holds that there is a “right time” for patients to disclose information
and confront themselves (Smith 56).
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 473

The “right time” varies by situation; thus the nature of kairos is subjective. As Tillich writes, kairos
“is not the quantitative time of the clock, but the qualitative time of the occasion” (History 1). Kairos
imbues that occasion with positive possibility: kairotic time is right, ripe for action, creation, and
transformation. In addition, kairos includes a sense of time as relational and a perception of events as
interconnected. Kairos describes “the special position an event or action occupies in a series, to a
season when something appropriately happens […] to a time that marks an opportunity which may
not recur” (Smith 47). In other words, kairos links events occurring in the present to events of the
past and future, understanding them as part of a larger series, season, or whole.
Chronos challenges many characters in Goon Squad, who wonder where time went and who
struggle to process who they have become. Jocelyn gives her youth to a wealthy older man and his
drugs and must start her life over and over again. Linear time escapes Jocelyn; she “feels ambushed”
by the years between meeting Lou at 17 and visiting him on his deathbed when she is 43 (Moling
53). Jocelyn cannot recognize her former lover in the elderly person he becomes and wishes for “the
other one, the selfish, devouring man” he used to be (89). But kairos offers an escape from the
hourglass. Equally important, creative potential exists within the artistic domain of kairos. In art,
John E. Smith explains, “kairos is the right measure or proportion directed by the aim of creating a
unified, individual work expressive of esthetic value” (56). Kairos can be found in a musical
performance, a painting, a sculpture, and a novel. Goon Squad encompasses these and more,
synthesizing various forms in a fiction that takes artistic proportion and unity in new directions.
Goon Squad’s opening chapter lays the foundation for its exploration of kairotic potential. The
chapter’s title is a cheeky misnomer: the items in “Found Objects” are stolen, not found. Sasha’s
kleptomania is a destructive affliction, yet it also mirrors the process of artistic creation. As David
Cowart has shown, Sasha’s stealing “hints at the history of art itself as a chronicle of the appropria-
tions or thefts that enable each succeeding generation to achieve a paradoxical originality” (251–52).
Sasha’s seemingly illegible yet intentional array of stolen items represents Goon Squad’s apparently
disconnected parts, voices, styles, and time periods. In Sasha, Egan creates a character for whom
thievery is as natural and deep-seated as it is in art and literature. Equally important, the art Sasha
makes by arranging stolen objects in this section and sculpting garbage in chapter 12 “replicates that
of Jennifer Egan, who also pieces together bits and pieces of narrative” as well as elements of both
modern and postmodern literature (Cowart 252). Readers participate in compiling the pieces as they
draw inferences from Goon Squad’s missing parts and gaps in time. Egan has acknowledged that “a
lot of the action happens offstage” (Author Events). Equally important, she claims that readers tell
authors what books are, not the other way around: “I had no idea what Goon Squad was until I
started talking to readers,” she said in 2017, “and they filled me in” (Author Events). Readers
construct meaning from disconnected parts, as Sasha does first with the items she steals and later
with her found-object sculptures.
“Found Objects” introduces the concept of a narrative pieced together and collaboratively
authored. Mixed feelings about her often-uncontrollable urge to steal other people’s belongings
compel Sasha to seek treatment. Egan describes Sasha and Coz, her therapist, as writing a story
together, “a story of redemption, of fresh beginnings and second chances” that results in healing
(8–9). The co-authored story of Sasha’s rehabilitation, together with her pile of “found objects,”
symbolize the novel itself. Goon Squad makes readers into collaborators who work with the author to
construct the narrative. At first glance, Sasha’s prognosis appears bleak, and her story seems certain
to end badly. Addiction disrupts the forward momentum of her life, mirroring Jocelyn’s story. Adrift
at 35, Sasha works a temporary job and pretends to be younger. She listens to the clock ticking in her
therapist’s office, unconvinced by his constant reminders of her empathy for the people she robs.
The ticking clock provides auditory and visual imagery that reflects time running out, a manifesta-
tion of Sasha’s fears that her behavior is too ingrained and that it is too late for her to change. She
has been a thief since her troubled childhood, as readers learn in chapter 11, “Goodbye, My Love.”
This section appears later in the novel, though it recounts an earlier chapter in Sasha’s life. But
rewriting the story of her life with Coz offers hope for a seemingly incurable case.
474 M. J. STRONG

Together with her therapist, Sasha resolves to redirect her life. Kairos allows their shared purpose
to take root, so that Sasha grows and heals. This process actually slows time for Sasha, which her
grasping at spent youth failed to achieve. “She and Coz were collaborators” in writing that story
“whose end had already been determined: she would get well. She would stop stealing” (6). And
while Coz may guide Sasha through the process, they both recognize that she must heal herself. The
story’s beginning and end are clear, but there are gaps in the middle: Sasha and Coz decide she will
transition from afflicted to healed, but they do not know when or how this will happen. The gaps in
Sasha’s story raise questions about time that Goon Squad’s characters ask again and again: How did
things get to this point? How did we become who we are today? What happened to us? In Coz’s
office, kairos transforms temporal gaps associated with negativity—nostalgia, loss, and fear—into
places of possibility.
Pauses in conversation during appointments with Coz make Sasha “keenly aware” of his expec-
tant presence (18). The pause raises the expectation of progress, which in turn leads Sasha to
envision transformation. She imagines satisfying her therapist’s expectation with evidence of her
progress. The evidence might include rekindling a relationship, playing the musical instrument Sasha
had put aside, “or just I’m changing I’m changing I’m changing: I’ve changed!” (18) This emphatic
declaration reflects the desperation of Sasha’s constant desire to redeem herself: “God how she
wanted these things. Every day, every minute” (18). Kairos arises in the gaps in conversation during
therapy sessions, allowing Sasha to reflect on her past, imagine a different future, and recognize the
difficulty of change.
Consider the long pause as the clock ticks at the end of “Found Objects,” “the longest silence that
had ever passed” during one of Sasha’s therapy sessions (18). But this silence is not a void: it brims
with sound and activity, including rain on the windowpane and the “faint hum that was always
there” when Sasha listened (18). The humming sound draws Sasha into the present moment. In
other words, the pause in conversation with Coz raises Sasha’s awareness of where she is physically
as well as in time. Initially, this awareness produces a negative response. Heightened recognition of
the present moment causes Sasha to fear that time is running out. Panic sets in as she hears the clock
tick away “these minutes” that relentlessly pass, “another, then another, then one more” (18).
However, Sasha insists on occupying the moment as it slips away. This contributes to her cure
along with tenaciously attending therapy and pursuing a new end to her story. Sasha finds kairos in
Coz’s office: the minutes ticking past become the right time for her to change. She lay “claiming the
couch, her spot in this room” as if she can will into existence the self she wishes to be through
creating physical space for it (18). And she does; the long silence in therapy frees room for new
choices, behaviors, and relationships.
The pause of self-reflection makes it possible for Sasha to heal, and to create space for a new and
different self. Taking up space signifies power, according to Rebecca Solnit, who observes, “Physical
space […] can be conceived of as areas occupied” (5). Mapping conversations or economies as
territories would produce “a map of power and status: who has more who has less” (Solnit 5).
Interpreted through this lens, Sasha’s making time and space for reinvention constitute self-
empowerment. Pursuing kairotic possibility is hard work, though, as Tillich points out. In order
to change, Sasha must confront uncomfortable truths about herself and disclose them to her
therapist. Changing also requires facing her shortcomings and fears. This process may be difficult,
but the time was right for Sasha to pursue change. The reinvention she seeks occurs within the
transformative possibility of kairos.
Sasha’s signature “yes/no smile” offers further evidence that, despite appearances, she is not
powerless or out of control. She can change her life in time to make a difference. The yes/no smile
physically raises possibilities through embodying multiple options at once. Sasha’s smile poses both a
question and an invitation, imbuing a situation with potential. It interrupts chronos with the possibility
of kairos. The yes/no smile is the counterpart to Sasha’s warring needs to steal and to heal. The
“amazingly effective” yes/no smile contains kairotic potential (6). It changes the course of her evening
with Alex, causing him to re-evaluate Sasha and to extend their date. Granted, the yes/no smile yields
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 475

mixed results in “Found Objects.” Sasha returns a wallet she stole, and Alex takes a second look at her.
However, prolonging the date leads to Sasha stealing from Alex. Nevertheless, the smile always
contains potential for a “yes.” This opens doors later in Sasha’s story, and readers later encounter
her transformed, healed, and settled down.
Chapter 12 reveals a changed Sasha years later, a loving mother and beloved wife, an active
member of her community, and a productive artist. She continues to collect “found objects,” but this
now involves turning items that have been discarded, not stolen, into art. Sasha’s art reflects her
rehabilitation: the woman who creates art no longer steals, avoids personal relationships, or disguises
her true self. Previously, Sasha hid her past, including the time she lost to a troubled youth and an
aimless adulthood. The transformed Sasha has built a new life upon her past, using an artist’s
approach to collage a cohesive, functioning whole person out of formerly mismatched parts of equal
beauty and ugliness.
Sasha creates sculptures using the same pieced-together process. Art provides a positive and
healthy outlet for Sasha to express herself and communicate with others. The sculptures serve a
purpose, and they convey a message that others discern and find meaningful. As Sasha’s daughter
explains, “Mom makes sculptures in the desert out of trash and our old toys. Eventually, her
sculptures fall apart, which is ‘part of the process’” (242). This statement reveals Sasha’s awareness
of her artistic process and its message, which is clear to viewers. Sasha turns “trash” into art, making
something valuable out of worthless materials, and then she purposely allows her art to deteriorate
naturally. It may crumble into pieces that resemble their original states or simply break apart, so the
sculpture once again becomes a collection of unrelated items. Sasha facilitates the transformation of
junk into art into junk, so that her creations gain and lose meaning and value over time. The
intentional nature of this cycle of creation and devolution demonstrates awareness of the life cycle.
Before Sasha changed, her collection of stolen items suggested creative ability. Then, however,
Sasha’s potential as an artist was curbed by the reality of her stealing and the incoherence of her
collection. She arranged objects in a way “clearly not random” yet “illegible” to everyone but Sasha
(14–15). Her impulses were similarly mixed. On the one hand, Sasha imagined she might return the
stolen property. On the other, she hoarded her loot to extend the thrill of stealing. Sasha’s
uncertainty and the unclear aims of her collection indicate its flaws. A cohesive work of art needs
a message shaped by its curator’s vision, but Sasha is not sure whether her “found objects” reflect her
potential for healing—returning the stolen items—or her addiction to destructive behavior.
The chapter that reveals the transformed Sasha, “Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” also portrays the
ability of kairos to arrest the linear, clock time of chronos. The chapter’s name comes from the rock-
and-roll pauses that capture the attention of Sasha’s children, Lincoln and Alison. The gaps
purposely inserted into popular songs of the twentieth century, such as “Young Americans”
(1975) by David Bowie, “Foxy Lady” (1967) by Jimi Hendrix, and “Bernadette” (1967) by the Four
Tops, create the illusion of being outside of time (Moling 57–58). As Martin Moling explains, this
section “puts a new spin on the ancient paradox of the lifelessness of timeless art” since songs with
pauses “can simultaneously ‘breathe,’” as Hendrix does during the pause in “Foxy Lady,” and
“imitate eternity” so that are they at once novel and immortal (58). The pauses in “Foxy Lady”
and other tunes delay the song’s end. The end comes eventually, but the pause’s kairotic “now”
postpones that end through making the song last longer.
Set in the near future, the chapter is a PowerPoint diary created by Sasha’s twelve-year-old
daughter, Alison Blake. Egan’s use of PowerPoint slides “imbue[s] cold corporate software with
humanity and creative possibility,” as Moling notes (65). Alison fills a blank digital space with self-
reflection and personal expression, a process similar to her mother’s conversion of unwanted items
into sculpture. The diary chronicles two days in the lives of the Blake family: Alison, her brother,
Lincoln, and their parents, Sasha and Drew. During this time, Lincoln’s obsession with rock songs
containing pauses shapes family conversations and interactions, and Alison includes her brother’s
ideas in her diary. Lincoln studies the pauses in different songs, analyzing their impact and becoming
such an expert that Alison says, “He knows more than grown-ups about certain things” (243). As
476 M. J. STRONG

Sasha explains to Drew, who cannot understand why Lincoln loves musical pauses, “The pause
makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved. But then
the song does actually end, because every song ends” (281). The pauses that capture Lincoln’s
imagination prompt Alison to reflect on gaps in conversation, time, and space. Alison’s reflection
ultimately leads her to inhabit kairos as well as chronos.
Alison experiences and records time as fluid. Time expands for her on some occasions, and on
others past and present telescope together. For instance, Alison’s diary describes a walk she takes
with her father as lasting for “several years” (297). Initially, this may sound like a typical adolescent
complaint, but Alison’s time play is not mere exaggeration. She documents the multiple layers of her
perceptions during a single instance in the diary slide “Walking to the Car,” when she, Lincoln, and
Sasha cross the parking lot after the baseball game. The slide visually portrays simultaneous actions
as two collections of shapes, rectangles, and pie-chart pieces. The shapes also document Alison’s
recognition of the existence of multiple selves and realities. The rectangles depict her outward self,
who interacts with her mother and brother, and the pie-chart pieces reflect her inner self. Naturally,
the “outward self” rectangles surround the “inner self” pie chart, which consists of thoughts and
feelings Alison shares only with her diary. On the outside, Alison is interacting with others,
including her brother and her mother. But even these interactions are multilayered: Alison rolls
her eyes at Sasha in typical preteen fashion, yet she helps her brother, whose autism challenges social
interaction.
While all of this is happening, Alison’s inner self is somewhere else. First, Alison recognizes that
her inner and outer selves coexist. This leads her to explore the moments within moments, and the
ability of kairos to interrupt chronos. Alison’s inner self pauses to think about the temperature of the
air and the asphalt, even stopping to touch it. As she does, Alison notices “the parking lot […]
glitters like coal in the moonlight,” an observation that shows her keen awareness of her surround-
ings and her ability to occupy fully even mundane moments of her life (238). She awakens to kairotic
possibility when she perceives layers of reality and spaces in time.
Alison struggles with this possibility, as her mother did, and as Tillich argues we must in
order to access kairos. Alison’s keen awareness of time raises sensitivity to its passing, which
provokes fears that echo her mother’s anxiety as the clock ticked in her therapist’s office. Then,
Sasha appeared stuck with a version of herself she disliked. She worried time would run out
before she could become the person she wishes to be. Alison confesses similar fears in her diary,
creating a chart titled “What I’m Afraid Of” after the seemingly interminable walk with her
father (299). The chart describes a nightmare vision revealing Alison’s fear of losing her youth,
that time will rush past so quickly she misses her teen and young adult years. Alison imagines
she unwittingly enters a time machine and becomes “a grown-up woman coming back to this
place”—the Blake family home—“after many years” (299). Her concern suggests precocious
awareness that the passage of time can seem so rapid it resembles time travel, that years can
pass so quickly that a person may not even notice. Alison envisions the sudden, frantic
realization that adults often experience: youth has ended and large portions of life have passed.
Sasha felt these feelings in her 30s, but her daughter is only 12. Alison’s feelings about time
demonstrate poignant insight that typically comes with adult maturity.
Alison also feels nostalgia, an emotion more common in adults than children. Mature
characters such as Lou and Bennie feel nostalgia. But their nostalgia is for the past, and Alison
experiences nostalgia for the present. She reflects on the sweetness of her current life with her
family despite the occasional fights, as if the present is the past and she is the adult woman she
fears she has become. “I’ll always miss it,” she says, as if her fear that she has aged decades has
come true and “my parents are gone, and our house isn’t ours anymore” (299). Alison expresses a
sentiment from an imagined adult perspective, foreseeing an inevitable future in which her
parents have died and the Blakes no longer live together in their family home. Imagining her
adult self and that self’s feelings link Alison’s present and future, allowing her to recognize kairos
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 477

as expansive and chronos as fleeting. As a result, she has the ability to fully inhabit the present
moment and enjoy it more than others.
Alison’s visions of the future simultaneously reflect childish fantasy and adult pragmatism.
Inevitably, children grow up and leave their childhood home, and parents die. However,
preternatural nostalgia represents another attempt to stop time within itself. Kairos interrupts
chronos, allowing Alison to savor moments in her young life and attempt to inhabit them fully.
In doing so, she works to avoid actually having the experience of life passing her by. Alison’s
intentional presence in the moment, and her recording of particular moments in her diary,
signify an effort to pause and slow the inevitable end, just like Lincoln’s rock-and-roll pauses.
Lincoln extends each song’s pause even further by looping recordings to produce more silence,
and Alison confides to her diary that “the pauses are my favorite” (246). The looped pauses
coincide with Alison’s recognition that time may progress in a linear and finite manner, but its
progression can be temporarily disrupted, like a song with a pause. She begins to create temporal
pauses in her daily life: stopping to examine the glittering asphalt and distilling moments of
her day into her diary.
Alison uses the space she creates to become more present in the moment. Instead of filling up
temporal pauses in her life, she focuses on what already exists. Alison lists things she notices around
her, including wind turbines, solar panels, a “whisper of orange on the horizon,” and the stars above
(251). This practice mirrors her mother’s observations of her surroundings in the therapist’s office
years earlier, where Sasha, too, perceived sights and sounds that usually escaped notice, such as a
window “rinsed continually with rain, smearing lights in the falling dark” (18). Alison learns to root
herself in the present moment through paying attention to the world around her, a process that
creates the illusion of looping time and temporarily stopping the clock.
Alison also plays with time by relating the past to the future. When she examines a picture of her
mother’s best friend, who died in college, she pretends to foretell the future. “If you look carefully,”
Alison says, “you can tell that Rob will die young. He has that look of someone who’s only in old
pictures” (273). And sometimes Alison envisions different periods of time overlapping. When Drew
embraces Lincoln, she sees “Dad hug his skinny-long ago self” rather than his son (283). A toy horse
Alison keeps in her room links her parents’ past, before she was born, to the present time they share.
The horse, made of apricot shells, symbolizes the beginning of a new chapter in Sasha’s life. Sasha
got the horse when she reunited with Drew overseas before they moved to California and started a
family. Sasha tells her daughter, “We thought our baby might play with that horse,” and Alison
admits that she still plays with it (255). She knows she is too old for toys, but she enjoys her ability
“to make the prediction come true” (255). Playing with the horse, as Sasha and Drew hoped their
future children might, maintains continuity between past and present and allows Alison to make
their dream into reality.
On the PowerPoint slide following Alison’s discussion of the horse, a single sentence suggests
the powerful emotions it elicits from Sasha: “‘Oh Ally, I love seeing that horse,’ Mom says”
(256). Bracketed by the slide, the sentence visually evokes Sasha standing in the doorway of
Alison’s room, watching her daughter with the horse, and thinking of the hopes she and Drew
had more than a decade earlier. In Pakistan, they imagined a baby. Years later in California, they
have had two children who have entered adolescence. The horse represents the doorway between
Sasha’s present fulfilled dreams and her troubled past. Alison’s use of brackets on the slide
suggests the doorway of time. Sasha’s life extends through the doorway, and Alison exists on one
side. She catches glimpses of her mother’s past on the other side, but in between there is much
she does not know.
Despite the difficulties Sasha survived, Alison admires her mother’s former self and wishes to
understand what that person was like. Sasha’s past is a mystery to her daughter and unreal to Sasha
herself. As she tells Alison, “I don’t trust my memories,” because the time before she reunited with
Drew “feels like another life” (259). However, Alison perceives value in the past her mother wishes to
bury. In a decades-old picture of Sasha, her daughter sees “someone I want to know, or maybe even
478 M. J. STRONG

be” (258). Sasha refuses to discuss that time in her life. What her daughter finds alluring reminds her
of struggles that Alison correctly guesses include bad, dangerous, and embarrassing things (261).
Again with maturity beyond her years, Alison connects with her mother’s past self even as Sasha
wishes she could erase it. She combines parts of Sasha into a whole, as her mother does with the
desert sculptures.
The worst of Sasha’s past self appears in the chapter preceding Alison’s PowerPoint diary.
“Goodbye, My Love” follows Ted, the uncle sent by Sasha’s mother and stepfather to search for
their teen daughter in Naples. Ted initially seems an odd choice, but his memories of Sasha
interspersed throughout the chapter reveal they once were close. Ted remembers five-year-old
Sasha as “a tiny little woman, knowing, world-weary” and aware of the violence between her soon-
to-divorce parents as well as Ted’s mission to distract her from it (219). Sasha was a “lovely,” even
“bewitching,” girl despite her somber perceptiveness (213). Adolescence transformed her into a
troubled young adult with a “catalog of woes” including drug use, arrests, and multiple suicide
attempts (213). Even before she ran away from home at 17, Ted considered her “lost” (214). In
Naples, Sasha hits rock bottom. Completely alone, she subsists through stealing and sex work.
Yet even at her nadir, Sasha accesses kairotic potential. A moment at the chapter’s end interrupts
chronos, which demonstrates Sasha’s latent capacity to change when the time is right. The kairotic
moment also creates a pause that fosters human connection, in which Sasha, who repeatedly lies to
her uncle about her life in Naples, allows Ted to see her true self. This begins when Sasha admits Ted
to her room in the boarding house to which he has tracked her, but only after making him wait “[f]
or a long time—hours, it seemed” in the hallway so that Ted’s sense of himself in time and space
practically dissolves (230). He “imagined he was an element of the palace itself […] whose fate it was
to witness the ebb and flow of generations” as the building gradually crumbles over time (230). Only
then, after Ted glimpses kairos, does Sasha allow him to enter her room, where a coat hanger bent
into a circle hangs in the window. As the sun sets, it “was captured inside her circle of wire,” creating
the illusion of Sasha causing time to stand still (233). “See,” she says of the sun, “It’s mine” (234). The
wire circle holds the sun, and Sasha holds time, for just a moment. Ted’s ability to recognize Sasha’s
challenge to clock time, and his response of “surprise and delight,” make it possible for Sasha to drop
her mask (233).
Sasha exposes a self that is not the imperiled wanderer her parents imagine or the worldly traveler
she pretends to be. Instead, she is a complex young woman with positive and negative traits who has
the intent and ability to alter the course of her life. Before, she saw no future for herself and
attempted suicide. Now, she has become a survivor trying to forge new paths. In the squalid
boarding house, Egan reveals Sasha’s appreciation for beauty and goals for the future. The mint
sprig scenting her room allows Sasha to personalize and beautify the meager space she occupies. Her
books, The History of the World in 24 Lessons and Learning to Type, demonstrate desire to learn and
to improve herself. Pretending to capture the sun reflects Sasha’s vision of a better life and adequate
time for relishing it. Showing Ted the illusion reflects Sasha’s honest sharing of her present
circumstances, awareness that her family considers her lost, and determination to change before
time runs out.
Sasha’s wire suncatcher holds the sun only briefly just once a day as it sets, making only a moment’s
pause possible. The brevity of the illusion reflects that happiness is fleeting and nothing can last, and
Sasha’s knowledge of this transience. Through sharing the illusion of stopped time with Ted, Sasha can
be truly present with him. With the sun captured in the wire circle, they pause long enough to be candid
with each other and to jolt themselves out of stuck places in their lives. Ted goes to Naples to rescue
Sasha, but he also flees impasses in his career and his marriage. Kairos helps both Ted and Sasha rescue
themselves. Egan intercuts the suncatcher’s pause with visions of Ted and Sasha in the future, occupying
truer versions of themselves. Ted becomes a divorced grandfather visiting Sasha in California, where she
transforms into a person “like anyone,” ordinary and settled down (233). Readers see Sasha there in the
next chapter, though Egan does not explain how Sasha gets from A to B.
 CRITIQUE: STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION 479

Narrative gaps in Goon Squad such as this one often are interpreted as reflecting dissolution
reminiscent of punk rock. For instance, Wolfgang Funk argues these features demonstrate Egan’s
recognition of literature’s limited ability to faithfully represent or reproduce reality (42, 44). David
Cowart calls Goon Squad a “downsized” version of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–27),
“chastened” with the “absolute fragmentation” characteristic of postmodernism, like puzzle pieces that
cannot be assembled into a recognizable image (245). However, as this essay has shown, time is not
always a goon: kairos makes it possible to slow down and pause, even for a moment. Within that
moment, Egan’s characters find relief from the ticking clock, opportunity for reinvention, and connec-
tion with others. Goon Squad’s characters experience kairos individually and subjectively, following Paul
Tillich’s conception of the term (History 1). Nevertheless, kairotic possibility promotes human connec-
tion, helping Sasha and Alison to be honest and present with others. In this way, Goon Squad
exemplifies the “drive towards inter-subjective connection and communication” and “sense of ‘pre-
sence’” that Nicoline Timmer observes in the twenty-first century’s most ambitious literary fiction (13).
Contemporary fiction, in Timmer’s view, strives to make connections and share feelings, not decon-
struct or destroy them. Similarly, Goon Squad’s hybrid form and nonlinear narrative link together
disparate pieces to create something new. The author herself states that she did not consider the book a
novel while working on it, “nor did I think of it as a collection of short stories.” Instead, Egan writes,
“Only when I found myself wanting to call its halves ‘A’ and ‘B,’ did I suddenly realize which genre I’d
been working in all along: the concept album” (“A Note from Jennifer Egan”). The book’s innovations
in form “extend the scope of the art of the novel,” according to Martin Moling, providing it with a future
in the digital era (53). Consequently, in revisiting popular music formats and genres of the twentieth
century, Goon Squad also offers hope for an industry transformed by the digital revolution.
In light of this, David Bowie, a music artist who defied time, offers a more fitting emblem of A Visit
from the Goon Squad than the punk rockers who envision no future. Alison’s “Great Rock and Roll
Pauses” slideshow refers to the pause in Bowie’s “Young Americans,” which follows a powerful question:
“Ain’t there one damn song that will make me/Break down and cry?” This question is a plea for
authenticity, for meaningful music that makes listeners feel and wrests tears from them. The concert in
Goon Squad’s final chapter achieves this level of authenticity and feeling. Scotty Hausmann’s “absolutely
pure” music unites a disparate community divided by generation, technology, identity, and circum-
stances (313). The concert makes listeners break down and cry, filling its venue—the empty space where
the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood—with human connection. Scotty’s concert
remakes that spatial void, and in the process he reinvents himself. Bowie was a master of reinvention,
which created the illusion of timelessness. “Young Americans” reflected Bowie’s then-latest incarnation,
marking his transformation from glam rocker to purveyor of what he called plastic soul. The plastic-soul
singer persona signified a powerful rebirth for Bowie, who was “at his lowest point” in late 1974 while
touring to support Diamond Dogs (Randle). The changes Bowie made extended his career through
rescuing it from the brink of death (Randle). Clock time may be a goon, but it is not the only conception
of time. For Bowie and for Egan’s characters, and for their audiences, kairos opens up temporal space in
which creativity emerges, people come together, change occurs, and meaning coalesces.

Note
1. Punk “means not accepting the ordinary terms of behavior” (Hell 2008). Punk artists sought to replace vacuous
pop with music “about real life” in all its “dirty and crazy and intense as well as funny” authenticity, according
to punk pioneer Richard Hell.

Notes on Contributor
Melissa J. Strong is an assistant professor of English at Community College of Philadelphia and a member of the
Education Advisory Committee to the Digital Public Library of America. Her publications on American literature and
culture include articles in Women’s Studies, Americana, Femspec, and Response and chapters in Teaching the
Literatures of the American Civil War (MLA, 2016) and Women and Work (Cambridge Scholars, 2011).
480 M. J. STRONG

Works Cited
Cowart, David. “Thirteen Ways of Looking: Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad.” Critique, vol. 56, 2015,
pp. 241–54. doi:10.1080/00111619.2014.905448. Accessed 19 Dec. 2016.
Egan, Jennifer. A Visit from the Goon Squad. Anchor Books, 2010.
———. “A Note from Jennifer Egan.” Online Catalog, Random House for High School Teachers, http://www.random
house.com/highschool/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307477477&view=rg. Accessed 5 May 2017.
———. Public Lecture. Author Events, Free Library of Philadelphia, 3 Oct. 2017.
Funk, Wolfgang. “Found Objects: Narrative (as) Reconstruction in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.” The
Aesthetics of Authenticity: Medial Constructions of the Real, edited by Wolfgang Funk and Imtraud Huber,
Transaction, 2012, pp. 41–61.
Hell, Richard. “My Punk Beginnings & Are Rock Lyrics Poetry?” Hell Updates, 2008. http://www.richardhell.com/
punkpoetry.html. Accessed 28 Sept. 2017.
Johnston, K. D. “Metadata, Metafiction, and the Stakes of Surveillance in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon
Squad.” American Literature, vol. 89, no. 1, 2017, pp. 155–84. doi:10.1215/00029831-3788753.
Moling, Martin. “‘No Future’: Time, Punk Rock and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.” Arizona Quarterly:
A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, vol. 72, no. 1, 2016, pp. 51–77. https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/
33254. Accessed 3 Jan. 2017. doi:10.1353/arq.2016.0000.
Moorey, Gerald. “Aging, Death, and Revival: Representations of the Music Industry in Two Contemporary Novels.”
Popular Music and Society, vol. 37, no. 1, 2014, pp. 65–84. doi:10.1080/03007766.2012.726036. Accessed 3 Jan. 2017.
Pauck, Wilhelm, and Marion Pauck. Paul Tillich: His Life & Thought, Vol. 1: Life. Harper & Row, 1976.
Smith, John E. “Time and Qualitative Time.” Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis, edited by
Phillip Sipiora and James S. Baumlin, SUNY Press, 2002, pp. 46–57.
Randle, Chris. “David Bowie: Cracked Actor (Live Los Angeles ’74).” Pitchfork, 29 June 2017, http://pitchfork.com/
reviews/albums/david-bowie-cracked-actor-live-los-angeles-74/. Accessed 3 July 2017.
Solnit, Rebecca. “Occupied Territory.” Harper’s, July 2017, pp. 5–7.
Tillich, Paul. The Protestant Era. U of Chicago P, 1948.
———. A History of Christian Thought, from Its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism. Simon and Schuster,
1968.
Timmer, Nicoline. Do You Feel It Too? The Post-Postmodern Syndrome in American Fiction at the Turn of the
Millennium. Rodopi, 2010.
van de Velde, Danica. “‘Every Song Ends’: Musical Pauses, Gendered Nostalgia, and Loss in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit
from the Goon Squad.” Write in Tune: Contemporary Music in Fiction, edited by Erich Hertz and Jeffrey Roessner,
Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 123–25.