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 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part B
Chapter 10 Summary: Out of Body
Sasha is in college and dating Drew. Rob, the narrator of this chapter, is Sasha’s best friend. Rob is still recovering from a suicide attempt two weeks earlier. He resents Drew and Sasha’s public displays of affection. Sasha and Rob became friends when she asked him to be her “fake boyfriend” (192), because she believed her stepfather had a detective following her. Sasha confessed to Rob about her stealing and told him that, in Naples, she’d had a sexual relationship with a man in exchange for money, saying, “I thought he was my boyfriend . . . But I think I wasn’t thinking anymore” (194). Rob confessed to Sasha that he once “drove to a secluded place and spent maybe an hour alone in the car” (195) with a football teammate. Rob observes that Sasha has seemed less troubled since meeting Drew, and this causes him to worry that he’ll lose her emotional support.
Sasha, Drew, and Rob go to a Conduits concert. While Sasha stays close to the stage, Drew moves back to where Rob is, and Rob begins to fantasize about having Drew as his brother, a fantasy that shifts into something more erotic, as he thinks, “If you could see Drew naked, even just once, it would ease a deep, awful pressure inside you” (199). After the concert, Sasha leaves Rob and Drew to go to a party with the Conduits’ producer Bennie Salazar, whom she’s just met. Rob remembers Sasha visiting him in the hospital, making him promise never to attempt suicide again.
Rob and Drew go to Lizzie’s place, then leave with Bix and wander down to the East River, where the sun is coming up. Still stoned, Bix begins to prophesy, “Everyone we’ve lost, we’ll find. Or they’ll find us” (203). When Bix leaves them at the river, Rob confesses to Drew that he fantasizes about him. He tells Drew that Sasha was a hooker in Naples, then immediately regrets betraying her. When Drew walks away, Rob follows him to a beach full of garbage between the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. Drew undresses in front of Rob and dives into the frigid East River. Rob follows Drew into the river, gets caught in a current, and drowns.
Chapter 11 Summary: Good-bye, My Love
Ted Hollander is in Naples, supposedly to search for his niece, Sasha, but instead he’s exploring the city’s art. He remembers her as a child, “lovely—bewitching, even” (213). She disappeared two years ago, at seventeen, after years of self-destructive behavior and a series of unsuccessful therapies.
Ted is moved by a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice, “the quiet of their interaction, the absence of drama or tears as they gazed at each other, touching gently” (214). He discovers Sasha by accident on a sidewalk. He recalls the summer when Sasha’s parents divorced, how he would take her—then only about five years old—away from the house so she wouldn’t have to witness her father’s violence. He remembers being protective of her, wanting to “rescue her: wrap her in a blanket and secrete her from the house before dawn; paddle away in an old rowboat he’d found; carry her down to the beach and not turn around” (220).
At a restaurant, Sasha asks Ted about his work, then about his wife. She tells him about following her boyfriend to Tokyo, and how he abandoned her in Hong Kong. They leave the restaurant and go to a night club. Ted discovers scars on Sasha’s arms, which she explains by saying, “A lot are by accident” (225). When he dances with her, Ted has a sense of “ragged sorrow” (226) that Sasha is now an adult, and that he is no longer the 25-year-old who loved her. He discovers she has stolen his wallet after she leaves him at the club.
The next day, Ted seeks out Sasha and finds her on the top floor of a squalid palazzo. She tries to drive him away, but he waits outside her door until she tosses his wallet out to him, the contents untouched. He stays outside her door, silent, until Sasha invites him in. When he sits with her in her room, he recognizes “how alone his niece was in this foreign place. How empty-handed” (232).
The narrator reveals to us that, in the future, Sasha will have a family and be “like anyone” (233). Ted will visit her and reminisce about sitting with her in this room in Naples.
Chapters 10-11 Analysis
Chapters 10 and 11 provide further insight into Sasha’s history, giving the perspectives of two men who love her and want to protect her, but who, at the same time, inflict harm on her. Rob tells the story of Sasha when she returns home after running away, the college student who has given up stealing—at least for the time being—and has a relationship that gives her hope for a different kind of life. Rob knows her vulnerabilities and relates to them, he sees the potential for them to rescue each other. When Sasha turns to Drew, Rob betrays her confidence in an attempt to keep her for himself. In “Goodbye my Love,” her Uncle Ted’s reluctance to accept Sasha as a grown woman hints at an attachment to the child Sasha, which is disturbingly erotic in nature. We are left to wonder whether Sasha’s explicit troubles—such as her parents’ violent relationship—might actually be secondary to some more subtle and sinister abuse at the hands of her uncle.
“Out of Body” once again explores the idea of matched pairs through the characters of Rob and Sasha. Rob sees in Sasha the potential to “begin over again” (197), but only recognizes it when she finds that renewal in Drew. Sasha also describes them as a matched pair when she visits Rob in hospital and tells him that, unlike many other broken people she has known, they are both survivors.
Individually, both Rob and Sasha observe their own fractured identities. When Sasha confesses to Rob about her stealing, she says, “That wasn’t me in Naples . . . I don’t know who that was. I feel sorry for her” (194). When Rob remembers being intimate with his teammate, he thinks, “It wasn’t you in the car with James. You were somewhere else, looking down, thinking . . . How can he live with himself?” (195). Rob narrates the entire story from the second-person point of view, referring to himself as “you,” further emphasizing his sense of himself as two people at once.
In “Out of Body” there is another depiction of the sunrise over the East River, which recalls the sunrise Scotty witnesses in “X’s and O’s.” Rob observes “a couple of toothless geezers fishing under the Williamsburg Bridge” (204), the same bridge where Scotty fishes with Sammy on the morning he witnesses the sunrise, saying with sinister foreshadowing, “Silver poured over the water. I wanted to jump in and swim” (106). As Drew and Rob approach the river, Rob observes that “the sun blazes into view, spinning bright and metallic against your eyeballs, ionizing the water’s surface so you can’t see a bit of pollution or crud underneath” (202-03). His perception of the sun as “metallic” mirrors Scotty’s description of the light as “silver.” We have a sense that both of these events could have happened on the same day, although the context of each of the stories insists that “Out of Body” takes place in the early 1990s, while “X’s and O’s” takes place in the late 1990s. Again, the repetition of scenes gives a sense of constancy in the face of passing time.
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