'Goon Squad' unpredictable, smart

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD. By Jennifer Egan. Knopf. 273 pages. $25.95.

Reality in a Jennifer Egan novel is a makeshift thing, part fact, part imagination, and always prone to the slippage of memory and delusion.

By the last chapter, set sometime in the 2020s, of her new novel, "A Visit From the Goon Squad," the very word "real" appears on a list of empty words that need to be encased in quotation marks. Yet Egan's book is in touch with the deepest of realities: how we experience the passage of time (the "goon" of the title).

Egan structures "Goon Squad" as a series of linked stories, each easily comprehensible as a stand-alone piece. Scrambled chronologically, mixed in voice and perspective -- one chapter is even in the form of a power point -- the chapters unfold to suggest the interplay of luck and purpose that makes up any life.

Over and over, characters repeat some version of the line, "I don't know what happened to me." One answer comes in the last chapter: "You grew up ..."

Most of the characters in "Goon Squad" have some connection to the music industry. Bennie Salazar, for instance, gets a first mention in the opening chapter when Sasha, another major character, names him as her boss at Sow's Ear Records. In the second chapter, he's center stage as a recently separated father who has sold his record company.

At loose ends in many ways, Salazar has taken to sprinkling gold flakes in his coffee (good for sexual potency). By the time the novel picks up Salazar's earlier history -- chapters on his marriage and on his youthful punk band -- Egan has undermined the very idea of a linear, purposeful journey through life. The highs are brought low, the lows rise up high, and the relationships between inputs and outcomes aren't always clear.

How did Scotty Hausmann, the romantic lead of the band, become a trash collector by the East River? How does Sasha move from kleptomaniac runaway to collage artist?

Egan's smart, unpredictable novel doesn't pretend to have the answers. It just charts the shifting ratio between hope and dread, as the goon stalks.