82 pages • 2 hours read
Jennifer EganA Visit from the Goon Squad
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part B
Chapter 7 Summary: A to B
New to their wealthy neighborhood, Bennie and his wife Stephanie begin to feel accepted socially when they join the Crandale Country Club. Stephanie begins a tennis partnership with Kathy and enjoys feeling a part of the new circle of friends. However, Bennie feels increasingly excluded. At a party, Stephanie observes the way people, suspicious of Al Qaeda operatives, signal to each other to watch what they say around Bennie. That night, she suggests that they move away, but Bennie says, “Let them move . . . This is my fucking house” (118). Stephanie continues to meet Kathy for tennis, but is careful to “edit these games out of Bennie’s view” (120).
When Stephanie makes a slip-up in concealing her tennis date from Bennie, she cancels her game with Kathy and reschedules a meeting with her boss, Bosco, to further cover up the original plan. Stephanie’s brother Jules, a former journalist who has been living with them since his release from prison two months ago, observes Noreen, the woman next door, as she creeps along the edge of the fence separating their properties, and suspects her of watching them. Jules comes along with Stephanie to meet Bosco. On the way, Jules observes that both Stephanie and Bennie “seem jumpy” (122). This makes Stephanie wonder if Bennie has resumed his old infidelities.
Bosco is an aging rock star whom Bennie discovered years ago and who Stephanie now works for as a publicist. Dying of cancer, Bosco wants to stage a comeback, to make a grand spectacle of his death. Stephanie thinks the idea is a form of “self-delusion” (128), but Jules is inspired to write about Bosco’s “Suicide Tour” (129). After the meeting, Stephanie feels deflated, but Jules reassures her, “Sure, everything is ending . . . but not yet” (132).
When Bennie gets home late that evening, he goes straight to the shower. Stephanie undresses to take a shower with him, but then finds a bobby pin on the floor, “generic light gold, identical to bobby pins you’d find in the corners of nearly any Crandale woman’s house. Except her own” (134). She realizes that Bennie has slept with Kathy. Stephanie wanders into the garden and kneels down in a flower bed by the fence, ignoring the voices of Bennie and Chris calling out for her from inside the house. Noreen speaks to her from the other side of the fence, and Stephanie answers her, before returning inside.
Chapter 8 Summary: Selling the General
Dolly Peale used to be La Doll, until a malfunction at an event she organized resulted in injuries to the guests and jail time for Dolly. She now does PR work for a military despot known as General B. She hires Kitty Jackson, an actress with a tarnished reputation, to act as a romantic interest for the general. Dolly agrees to let her nine-year-old daughter Lulu come on the trip, hoping to strengthen their strained relationship. When Dolly notices burn marks on Kitty’s arms, Kitty explains that she inflicted them on herself so that people will think she was at “The Party.”
Dolly, Kitty, and Lulu meet Arc, the general’s assistant, who takes Dolly and Lulu on a tour of the city while Kitty stays behind at the compound. In a marketplace, Lulu chooses a star fruit, which Arc gives to her, while the vendor—clearly knowing Arc’s association with the general—looks on without protest. Lulu shares the star fruit with her mother and Dolly’s spirits lift when Lulu calls her “Mom. It was the first time Lulu had spoken the word in nearly a year” (153). The next day, on the way to meet the general, Kitty tells Lulu that although she loved acting, she didn’t like the people because they lied so much. When Lulu asks her if she tried lying, Kitty says she did, but “I couldn’t forget I was lying, and when I told the truth I got punished” (156).
Upon meeting the general, Kitty addresses him charmingly at first. Dolly takes photos with a hidden camera. Kitty suddenly turns on the general, asking him what he does with the dead bodies, and then asks, “Was I not supposed to bring up the genocide?” (160). The general’s soldiers drag Kitty away. Dolly and Lulu are immediately flown back to the US. The next day, Dolly releases the photos of the general and Kitty to the media. Arc calls Dolly to fire her and reassures her that Kitty is safe.
Some months later, the general’s country has transitioned to democracy. Dolly and Lulu now live outside the city where Dolly runs a gourmet shop. Kitty has recently released a new movie. Lulu is in a new school with a new group of friends, and nobody recognizes Dolly as La Doll.
Chapter 9 Summary: Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame, and Nixon!
“Forty-Minute Lunch” is written in the form of a magazine article, but the author, Jules Jones, is clearly coming unhinged. Jules meets Kitty at a restaurant and observes to his dismay that she “belongs in the category of nice stars” (167), one who will not give him much material to write about. Jules, who describes himself as a “balding, stoop-shouldered, slightly eczematous guy approaching middle age” (168), is aware of the limited time he has with Kitty, and tries to make her uncomfortable by suggesting that she is having an affair with Tom Cruise; he then tries to use his body language to unnerve her. Jules begins to conflate Kitty with Janet Green, his “girlfriend of three years and . . . fiancée for one month and thirteen days” (175), who recently left him for a memoirist. Aware that his forty minutes are almost up, Jules convinces Kitty to leave the restaurant with him and go for a walk in Central Park. In the park, they sit on the grass, and Kitty takes a picture from her purse, “a picture of a horse! With a white starburst on its nose. His name is Nixon” (181). Jules pushes her down, telling her to pretend she’s riding the horse. He attempts to rape her, but she sprays him with pepper spray and then stabs him with a Swiss Army knife.
Jules is indicted for attempted rape, kidnapping, and aggravated assault. Kitty sends him a letter, apologizing “for whatever part I played in your emotional breakdown” (184). The incident spawns a wave of media attention and soon “Kitty, the martyrish figurehead of this juggernaut, is already being touted as the Marilyn Monroe of her generation, and she isn’t even dead” (184-85).
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
Chapters 7-9 present characters at various points of success and decline. Bennie Salazar, having recently sold his business and realized his aspirations of living among the country club set, is at his peak. Because “A to B” takes place just a few years prior to the events in “The Gold Cure,” we know that Bennie’s decline is imminent: in just three years, he will be divorced, suffering impotence, and facing professional irrelevance. La Doll, who in “A to B” is at the height of her career, experiences professional death and subsequent rebirth in “Selling the General.” Jules’s burnout is narrated in detail in “Forty-Minute Lunch,” but in “A to B” he is in a state of renewal, a metaphorical shedding of skin made explicit through his preoccupation with his eczematous condition. Bosco, in contrast to the others, has decided to embrace his decline, to turn his death into a work of art.
By dramatizing the industry of publicity, Chapters 7-9 challenge ideas of perception and truth. In “A to B,” Stephanie finds her neighbor Noreen’s appearance unsettling, not because her hair is fake blond, but rather because it undermines the impression of natural color given by the more subtle highlights of the other women. In “Selling the General,” the infamous party that destroyed Dolly’s career has become a status symbol. Kitty, who was excluded from the guest list, has inflicted burns upon herself so that she appears to have been in attendance. For her, it is not important that she was there, only that it appear that she was there. It is also worth noting that we are told in “The Gold Cure” that Bennie bears scars from the event. Jules Jones’s breakdown in “Forty-Minute Lunch” satirically turns publicity upside down, when the journalist turns the gaze upon himself even as he inflicts literal physical harm on the woman who should be the subject of his exposé.
The title of chapter 7, “A to B” recalls Scotty’s question, earlier in the novel, “what happened between A and B” (101) and are used as the title for Bosco’s comeback project. In later chapters, we will see other ways that the characters of Bosco and Scotty are separate iterations of a similar character, in effect, a repeating pattern.
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