I think the New Yorker Book Club discussion technically started last week with Kate’s report on the “Eat, Drink, and Be Literary” event with Jennifer Egan and the New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, at B.A.M. “I became interested in Bennie while writing about Sasha, and interested in Bennie’s ex-wife while writing about Bennie … and a novel was born,” Egan said. This formula is what gives “A Visit from the Good Squad” its amorphous quality: it’s a novel, but one that reads like a collection of short stories. Bennie and Sasha are the novel’s protagonists, a record producer and his assistant, but it’s the ancillary characters in their lives—the aforementioned ex-wife, Sasha’s suicidal friend, an unstable, washed-up guitarist, the tender son of Bennie’s mentor—who, when given their own respective chapters, prove to be the most compelling.
Heartbreak, suicide, insanity: we’re firmly planted in the music business, in eras that range from the post-punk eighties to the near future, in which babies with handheld devices are the new tastemakers. The music industry’s unraveling has proven to be a template for others—publishing, for one—and here music’s shift from cultural barometer to background whine is used as an analogy for the movements, the changes, the general selling out that most us eventually do. Read more at newyorker.com…