And Mindy is enough of a provocation to rattle other members of the “Safari” group, particularly Rolph, Lou’s teenage son. His age can be pinpointed by a reference to the age of his daughter, Charlie, who is 14 in “Safari” but was 20 in “Ask Me if I Care.” Lou is accompanied on a trip to Africa by a couple of his children and also by his young girlfriend, a graduate student named Mindy. In “Safari,” the story that immediately follows, Lou is six years younger. Lou taunts her by announcing that he’ll never get old Rhea tells him he’s old already. When Rhea glimpses pictures of Lou’s children in his apartment amid the electric guitars and gold records, she has the guts to get angry at him. He’s living the high life, snorting cocaine and using his show-business clout to seduce teenage girls. We’re sick of them.”īut the slick, successful 40-something Lou, “a music producer who knows Bill Graham personally”, is no burnout.
Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. “The hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they’re begging on street corners all over San Francisco. “Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God,” she says, setting this particular section’s time, tone and intergenerational hostility. Lou is the fulcrum of “Ask Me if I Care,” a section of the book narrated by a high school girl named Rhea. Egan’s adjacent (though not consecutive) chapters, ending up very much the worse for wear. He appears early and then burns through a few of Ms. Egan’s extreme virtuosity, the same characters pop up in different parts of it.
A music mogul named Lou is one of the many characters who drift through Jennifer Egan’s spiky, shape-shifting new book, “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” Whether this tough, uncategorizable work of fiction is a novel, a collection of carefully arranged interlocking stories or simply a display of Ms.
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