"Silence" in Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad

            I chose to track the words “silent” and “silence” in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, because I was curios what role a word that is, in its strictest sense, an absence of sound, would play in a novel about music and the music industry.  What I found was compelling.  “Silent” and “silence” (and “silently”) occur a grand total of 27 times over the course of the novel.  Almost without exception, Egan uses “silence” not to describe a complete absence of sound, but instead an absence of the human voice.

            The first two cases of “silence” occur in the first chapter, between Sasha and her therapist, Coz:  “They sat in silence, the longest silence that had ever passed between them” (18).  Bennie remarks on nuns who have taken vows of silence, who he later attempts to sign them to a record label (20).  Sasha and Bennie sit “in silence,” as do Mindy and Albert (36, 68).  Silence surrounds Lulu, first with her mother after Kitty is taken by the general’s men, on page 161, and then twice during her meeting with Alex, on pages 318 and 322.  Even during the PowerPoint chapter, Sasha’s son is obsessed by the “partial silences” that occur in great rock songs, so much so that he meticulously records them and gives them meaning, like “time rushing past” (249).  Twice silence falls between Dolly and Arc, the man who speaks for the general on the phone (140, 163).

            Silence works at the employ of many of Goon Squad’s themes.  Silence serves, in many ways, as the novel’s marker for space between characters, for the “gaps” and “discontinuity” that Egan creates in her world.  It is the result of a chasm created between Alex and Lulu by their generational gap, as Alex stifles his curiosity about Lulu, who is part of a generation of youth who don’t swear or tattoo themselves, a generation of totally engaged “handset employees” (317).  Lincoln’s obsession with pauses in songs creates a distance between himself and his father.  Silence works between Sasha and her uncle, Ted, when he comes to find her in Naples.  It fills in the space where all the information that Sasha shares with Rob in the chapter before would go – it facilitates the “unknowingness” between characters, obscures them from one another.  Between Bennie and Alex, in the last chapter, silence brings awareness of the distance between who they used to be and who they are now, it sharpens their awareness of this thing that has “happened” to them, this occurrence called “aging.”  The idea of silence touches almost all of the characters, is woven into the novel’s themes, and keeps the characters from one another and the reader by barring communication wherever it appears.