Jennifer Egan

The novel consists of 13 chapters, which could be read as stories in their own right, so disparate are they in genre and style. The connection between them is extremely fragile, resting merely on the fact that each chapter shares a character with another. There is, therefore, neither a unified plot nor a hierarchy of characters; the whole resembles the faint interplay of subatomic particles (in this case, the protagonists), with the author like a perplexed physicist wondering whether «a particle can know what is happening to the others». That is to say: is it possible, in our fractured and liquid society, to find a common ground of relationships, or does each individual live as a solitary, incommunicable monad? From this opening alone, one can grasp that this is a complex, sophisticated, fragmented, and in some ways incomprehensible novel. It is difficult to provide a cohesive overview of the narrative. I will try. The story is supposed to unfold from the 1980s to the present day, with the Bush era in between, and all that it meant for the American consciousness. Bennie is a former musician and now a record executive; his assistant is Sasha, a young woman suffering from kleptomania. From these two characters, several paths branch out, which only at the end, perhaps, converge once more. In a succession that is disjointed from both a chronological and narrative standpoint (the temporal leaps are numerous, just as the links between the stories remain unclear), we follow the fortunes of the band Bennie belonged to in his youth, the familial and romantic affairs of the record executive who discovered the group, the story of Jules—the brother of Bennie’s ex-wife—who served years in prison for attempting to rape Kitty, a young actress whom we find, many years later, collaborating with Dolly, a publicist who was herself, at another point in time, the employer of Bennie’s wife when the two were not yet separated.In other stories we follow Sasha, her transgressive life among a group of youths devoted to sex and marijuana, and then, no less, in Naples, where she lives in the Spanish Quarter. The book closes with the characters now advanced in years, far removed from their reckless, confused lives. Bennie and Alex, an old friend of Sasha’s from whom she had once stolen a wallet, go looking for her to find out what became of her. They do not find her, and so we are left to conclude that a stable relationship between people is impossible—that we are like «blind» individuals knowing nothing of one another. Yet the generation of the 1980s, to which the characters belong, is now gone, swept away by the Bush era: new lifestyles are emerging, embodied by Lulu, Bennie’s assistant and, as it happens, Dolly’s daughter—willful, cold, decisive, technological. The novel, with which the author won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010, was presented in Italy under the title *Il tempo è bastardo*, placing the emphasis on one of the book’s central themes: memory as an extreme, confused attempt to return to youthful egocentrism, when «nothing was decided yet». Time—not chronological, but that of memory—could be the novel’s unifying element. Yet perhaps, to make sense of the book, a near-literal translation of the title is more fitting: a visit from a squad of reckless fools (literally, it would be from a squad of thugs). Indeed, the novel seems to narrate the retreat into a bourgeois, conformist lifestyle of a generation that wanted to live «over the top», free and transgressive: nostalgia for that happy age is all that remains. The author displays formidable writing talent, through the richness and elegance of her language and the multitude of literary genres in which she has successfully tried her hand. In one chapter, she even abandons prose in favor of a PowerPoint presentation. What is evident is the courageous pursuit of approaches capable of constructing the form of the novel upon new rules and styles. Innovation, however, got the better of her when it comes to the overall structure: an incomprehensible mosaic, a lack of narrative momentum, a redundancy of characters, and a dispersion of plotlines. What remains, then, are a few exquisite stories alongside others that are far less compelling, but the whole proves unreadable. Why skip it? It is a book too intellectualized to be an enjoyable read.