"Jennifer Egan article on explosion in world of Internet dating; in first half of 2003, Americans spent $214.3 million on personals and dating sites, with 40 million visiting at least one dating site in a month; some sites use complex algorithms to match people and others are simple listing services; first generation to come of age on Internet are now young adults and using Web to find everything they need, but fair number of people continue to feel stigma about online dating; key to sytem is personal profile, always available in queue of romantic prospects, and constantly being tweaked with newer, more flattering data and photos; search can lead to online flirting and perhaps in-person contact, where couple may or may not have chemistry, sometimes resulting in polite e-mail rejecting further dates; some sites exist simply for those who desire to meet for casual sexual encounters; people disillusioned with online dating say its promise of no-muss relationship attracts people with intimacy and commitment problems; issues of jealousy come up around people who continue to post profiles while they are dating; one couple's experience detailed; photos (L)"
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★ 3.5 · 26 ratings on Open LibraryFiction2011340 pages
Jennifer Egan's spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa. We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist's couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city's demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life--divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house--and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco's punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang--who thrived and who faltered--and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie's catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou's far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall. *A Visit from the Goon Squad* is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both--and escape the merciless progress of time--in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers. *From the Hardcover edition.*
