“No Future”: Time, Punk Rock and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad

This article presents a reading of Egan’s novel under the auspices of “time” as constitutive of both music and fiction writing. The rock songs that are quoted in the novel are investigated with regard to their ability to slow down time, dramatically enact pauses, and foreshorten experience. The article theorizes the literary forms Egan derives from punk rock – specifically a form of “punk time” – as an actual device for modulating time within the narrative. As such, Egan’s original incorporation of the aesthetics of punk into her novel as an “apocalyptic disruption” emerges as an attempt to both decelerate time and enact a thoroughgoing transformation of literary art in the face of a cultural climate informed by a pervasive “hyper-reality.”