On "A Visit from the Goon Squad" by Jennifer Egan *****

Labeled a novel, this is essentially a short story cycle. Each chapter picks up on a minor character from one of the previous chapters and tells a tale from that point of view. The episodes are not in chronological order. As such, I had at times difficulty remembering who a particular character was or where I'd come across the character before.

I'm a fan of short story cycles. I feel like they give me something I love--short stories--with a bonus--short stories that build on one another. What I'm not a fan of is publishers' attempts to rewrite such collections as something they aren't: novels. Or "novels in stories." I mean, come on. Is the American audience so averse to short stories that we have to label collections of them in a way that hides just what is being read? And does such labeling really pay off? Someone looking for a novel is going to be dissatisfied, and someone looking for stories might well pass the book up.

The stories here center around music and publicity. Most of the tales mention a woman named Sasha or a man named Bennie. Bennie is a record agent. Sasha is his assistant. We catch them--through other characters or themselves--at various times in their lives. So the book begins with Sasha on her analyst's couch, discussing why she likes to steal and how that makes her actually feel. She is also discussing Internet dating--and most particularly a date with a man named Alex, who discovers her table of stolen goods. I'd completely forgotten Alex by the time I got to the end of the book, which closes with a tale about Alex himself, working as a publicity agent for Bennie, who by now has been fired by the label he started and is having to start "fresh" with an old friend with whom he played in a band as a teen, a friend whom he once dismissed when that friend was more or less homeless and Bennie at the top of his game.

In between, we get tales of Bennie's band, of Bennie's mentor (an older record executive with a penchant for picking up barely legal girls, marrying them, siring by them, and discarding them a few years later), of offspring of that mentor on safari, of the brother of Bennie's wife come home from jail and rediscovering his love for promoting causes, of the woman--an actress--who put that brother in jail for kidnapping and attempted rape, of a publicist who hires that actress to give a dictator a softer appearance to the public, of Sasha's uncle going to search for the twenty-something her in Europe (where she has gotten into drugs, thievery, and the sex trade), and of Sasha's children's obsession with the pauses in songs.

The tales themselves seem to be on some level about the passage of time and how we can never hold on to the things we once were, though we obsess about them, that wonderful, joyous, beautiful, painful past: our youth.