A First Thought on Goon Squad

Of the whole book I still think it was the first chapter that moved me most. In it, Sasha (the novel's heroine, if it has one) meets and takes home Alex, who's new to New York. He's full of a sort of moral uprightness that Sasha thinks of as quaint; she herself is a guilt-ridden kleptomaniac. Finding herself alone with Alex's trousers while he's running a bath, Sasha goes through his wallet. She finds a small, faded note that says, "I believe in you," and steals it.

That touched me a lot, I think especially because somehow I felt for both the characters at once, in several different kinds of sadness. What is it that leads someone to carry around a note like that? We never learn. How would it feel to one day look inside your wallet for the note, and find it gone? Perhaps he had forgotten all about it, but I don't think so. And then, from Sasha's side, I think I can see why she would want to take - to have - such an item. It's both priceless and meaningless. But just like 'priceless' implies both that it has no value and all the value in the world, so 'meaningless' here means it has no meaning (we don't know its story) and all the meaning in the world (to him, and then, at one remove, to her).

In the last chapter of the book, we meet Alex again, later in life, when Sasha is a memory that niggles somewhere at the back of his mind. He is struggling with himself over his corruptibility: he's taken on a sordid job that he doesn't really believe in. He realises that although his wife sees him as incorruptible, and he once would have thought of himself that way, he no longer is. He doesn't remember the note, but we do. "I believe in you." Without the note, he has forgotten whatever it was he pledged of himself, whatever it was that made him upright and indignant in the first chapter, whatever it was that someone believed in, once.