At the concert, Jocelyn gives Lou oral sex as the band plays.

She convinces Lou to come see Bennie Salazar and Scotty Hausman’s band, The Flaming Dildos. Rhea’s friend Jocelyn begins sleeping with Lou, a powerful record executive and much older man. Rhea feels undesirable and not “punk” enough because of her freckles. Rhea, an insecure punk rocker with green hair, tells this story. In the next story, “Ask Me If I Care,” the narrative leaps back to the year 1979. She stops him, saying, “We need each other.” She then goes home. As Bennie drops Sasha off at her building, he tries to tell her about his attraction to her. Afterward, Bennie drops Christopher off at his mother’s house, and drives Sasha home.

His arousal, however, suddenly escapes him as a flood of shameful memories strikes him. The band is not selling albums, but as they play some new music for Bennie, he begins to feel sexually aroused by the music. Benny and his son Christopher meet Sasha, who is now Bennie’s secretary, at the home of one of the bands signed to his record label. He sprinkles gold flakes into his coffee to combat his sexual dysfunction. The next story is called “The Gold Cure.” This introduces Bennie Salazar, a divorced record executive in his mid-forties, who struggles with anxiety and sexual impotency. She finds a piece of paper that says, “I believe in you.” She steals the paper and puts the wallet back before he returns. Alex then takes a bath and Sasha goes through Alex’s wallet. Afterward, Sasha and Alex return to her apartment and have sex. After a brief confrontation with the woman Sasha stole from, Sasha returns the wallet and admits she has a problem. She recounts a date she went on with a man named Alex, during which she steals a wallet in the restaurant’s bathroom.

In the novel’s first story, “Found Objects,” Sasha meets with her therapist, Coz, with whom she is working to overcome an addiction to stealing.

Several characters appear in more than one story, and through the ways in which they appear at different points in time, their narratives become clear. The novel is also split into two parts-A and B-which echoes the two sides of an album. Instead, they leap through time, showing slices of different time periods occurring between the late 1970s and the 2020s. The stories, as they appear in the novel, do not follow a traditional chronology. Each chapter stands as a self-contained story, but as a whole, the individual episodes create connections that form a cohesive narrative. A Visit from the Goon Squad is unconventional in the way its narrative unfolds.

Lucca by Karen Michelle Nutt