A surprisingly powerful book that starts out a little oddly, Visit from the goon squad is one of the most fascinating, but perhaps most sobering, fictional take on where we are at the turn of the 21st century, and where we’re going.

On its surface it’s a book about a wide cast of characters whose lives revolve around the music industry in some fashion or other. At the center are two characters. The first is Sasha Blake, a twenty-something ne’er-do-well with sticky fingers and no apparent aim in life. She works for Benny Salazar, a cartoonishly boring middle-aged music executive who winds up being just a little too passionate about the music he’s producing. The book starts with these two characters, and careens tangentially to their friends, distant family members, long-lost bandmates, and more. The story jumps forward and backward in time, with no apparent rhyme or reason. Benny and Sasha show up again and again, the background of other characters’ stories, sometimes far into their past and sometimes far into their future. The overall effect is not unlike watching a vinyl record spin on a turntable.

The book’s focus appears in the last couple of chapters, which are set in a kind of mundanely dystopic future two or three decades after the book starts. (As it happens the predictions woven through these chapters were all a little pessimistic, but not altogether crazy.) It’s here that we see the book zero in on the September 11 terror attacks as a sort of central moment of trauma, one whose scars, both physical and metaphorical, don’t heal for quite some time. For all the dull dystopia of this future time, there is a glimmer of hope, crystalized by a singularly redefining musical concert that takes place on the former grounds of the World Trade Center, quizzically referred to as The Footprint. It’s a fascinating idea: music is the antidote to terror; it brings us together in a sort of sub-rational way in the same way that terror drives us apart. Both are built around cults of dual personality, although in very different ways. And both convey meaning and feeling symbolically rather than literally. These chapters transform the book from a sort of quirky look at the music industry into a much more profound commentary on the world we live in.

For some time now I’ve been fascinated by the impact that the September 11 attacks had on the world of literature. There are a handful of books which were clearly written in the shadow of that event: “Then we came to the end” and “The goldfinch” come to mind, among others. I think this book may be my new favorite in this rather grim little genre.

Without question this book is an excellent read; it’s a compelling look at the historical moment we live in.