82 pages • 2 hours read
A Visit from the Goon Squad
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Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part A
Chapter 5 Summary: You (Plural)
“You (Plural)” is set about a quarter-century after “Ask Me If I Care.” After Lou Kline’s second stroke, Bennie has called the old group together to visit him. Jocelyn, who narrates this chapter, is in recovery from her addictions. Lou is now confined to a bed, supported by breathing tubes and IV treatments. Rhea is able to talk to Lou jovially, but Jocelyn is distracted by the traumatic memories this visit is bringing up. Jocelyn compares her life—mid-forties, living with her mother while working towards her first college degree—with Rhea’s: married with three children, the oldest of whom is sixteen, or as Jocelyn observes, “almost my age when I met Lou” (87). She remembers Lou’s son Rolph, who was exactly the same age as her. She remembers kissing him, and she remembers that Rolph stopped speaking to her after a while. She asks Lou about him, forgetting that Rolph committed suicide many years before. Lou begins to weep, and Rhea reacts with empathy toward him, assuming that Jocelyn had not forgotten about the suicide, but was asking in order to hurt him. Jocelyn is struck with anger, and imagines pushing Lou’s bed into the pool to let him drown, then says to him, “I should kill you . . . You deserve to die” (90). He asks Jocelyn and Rhea to hold hands with him, and they flank his bed, holding his hands, looking at the pool, just like old times.
Chapter 6 Summary: X’s and O’s
Scotty Hausmann, the narrator of this chapter, lives a reclusive life in New York City. He sees an article about his old band-mate, Bennie Salazar, in a copy of SPIN magazine, and decides to send him a note. When Bennie responds with a polite typewritten letter, Scotty decides to pay him a visit, wearing his compulsively dry-cleaned jacket and bringing with him a fish he’s just caught in the East River. He goes to the Sow’s Ear offices with the fish in hand and refuses to leave until Bennie meets with him. Inside Bennie’s office, Scotty realizes that they are now more enemies than friends, and that this was “the reason I had come to see him” (101). When Scotty brings up Alice, his ex-wife, who had chosen Scotty over Bennie back when they were teenagers, he discovers that this is still a point of insecurity for Bennie. They talk about their current lives, Scotty telling Bennie about his divorce from Alice, and Bennie telling Scotty about his recent marriage and three-month-old baby. When Scotty smiles at Bennie with broken teeth, Bennie seems shocked. As Scotty is leaving, Bennie gives him a business card and tells him to contact him if he ever has any new music to show him. The next day, Scotty finds a junkie couple he recognizes in the park. He identifies them as musicians, believing he “could spot a musician anywhere” (106). He gives them Bennie’s business card and then goes to get his jacket dry cleaned again.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
“You (Plural)” and “X’s and O’s” provide the perspectives of Jocelyn and Scotty, two other members of the constellation of friends that surrounded Bennie Salazar in his youth. We begin to see inconsistencies emerging between chapters and between different characters’ accounts of events. Although in “You (Plural),” which takes place around 2006, Bennie says that “no computer can find” Scotty (85), we see in “X’s and O’s,” which takes place some years earlier, that the men have already had contact. This inconsistency reveals Bennie’s desire to keep Scotty at a distance.
Approaching the end of Part A of A Visit from the Goon Squad, we see more instances of identity pairings. Jocelyn as the narrator of “You (Plural)” provides a counterpoint to Rhea in “Ask Me If I Care.” Jocelyn shows the other half of the best-friend pair that flanked Lou Kline, and she also provides insight into their friendship in the present. . In Jocelyn’s relationship with Rolph, we see in their shared birthdays the potential for a pairing that is never fully realized, thereby creating a sense of disappointment. Scotty identifies himself and Bennie as another matched pair when he says, “we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only I’m an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe” (101).
In Chapters 5 and 6, the sun emerges as an important symbol. In “You (Plural),” Jocelyn gets headaches from the sun, and, at one point, describes the day as “a day when the sun has teeth” (90). By contrast, her memory of watching the sunrise with Rolph is one she associates with innocence, describing it as “this fragile new sun in our arms” (91). Scotty also has difficulty with sunlight, which he attributes to “eye damage I had as a kid” (105). Yet, toward the end of his story as he begins to feel optimistic, he describes a sunrise as “like an angel lifting her head” (106). When causing pain, the sun symbolizes the harshness of truth and revelation. However, the sunrise also symbolizes renewal, the hope associated with continual revolution.
The image of revolution recurs in a variety of ways in A Visit from the Goon Squad. The novel is built around the music industry and often uses images related to vinyl albums, causing us to think of the novel as, in a sense, a record. In its form, too, we see the many ways in which revolutions, or repeating circular patterns, create a combined sense of movement and repetition, change and continuity.
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