Free A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan Page B

Ramsey’s second in command, is driving. Mindy has managed to avoid Albert’s jeep for several days, but he’s developed a reputation for discovering the best animals, so although there’s no game run today—they’re relocating to the hills, where they’ll spend the night in a hotel for the first time this trip—the children begged to ride with him. And keeping Lou’s children happy, or as close to happy as is structurally possible, is part of Mindy’s job.
    Structural Resentment: The adolescent daughter of a twice-divorced male will be unable to tolerate the presence of his new girlfriend, and will do everything in her limited power to distract him from said girlfriend’s presence, her own nascent sexuality being her chief weapon.
    Structural Affection: A twice-divorced male’s preadolescent son (and favorite child) will embrace and accept his father’s new girlfriend because he hasn’t yet learned to separate his father’s loves and desires from his own. In a sense, he, too, will love and desire her, and she will feel maternal toward him, though she isn’t old enough to be his mother.
    Lou opens the large aluminum case where his new camera is partitioned in its foam padding like a dismantled rifle. He uses the camera to stave off the boredom that afflicts him when he can’t physically move around. He’s rigged a tiny cassette player with a small set of foam earphones to listen to demo tapes and rough mixes. Occasionally he’ll hand the device to Mindy, wanting her opinion, and each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrums—hers alone—is a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage, as if she were looking back on this lark in Africa with Lou from some distant future.
    Structural Incompatibility: A powerful twice-divorced male will be unable to acknowledge, much less sanction, the ambitions of a much younger female mate. By definition, their relationship will be temporary.
    Structural Desire: The much younger temporary female mate of a powerful male will be inexorably drawn to the single male within range who disdains her mate’s power.
    Albert drives with one elbow out the window. He’s been a largely silent presence on this safari, eating quickly in the meal tent, providing terse answers to people’s questions. (“Where do you live?” “Mombasa.” “How long have you been in Africa?” “Eight years.” “What brought you here?” “This and that.”) He rarely joins the group around the fire after dinner. On a trip to the outhouse one night Mindy glimpsed Albert at the other fire near the staff tents, drinking a beer and laughing with the Kikuyu drivers. With the tour group, he rarely smiles. Whenever his eyes happen to graze Mindy’s, she senses shame on her behalf: because of her prettiness; because she sleeps with Lou; because she keeps telling herself this trip constitutes anthropological research into group dynamics and ethnographic enclaves, when really what she’s after is luxury, adventure, and a break from her four insomniac roommates.
    Next to Albert, in the shotgun seat, Chronos is ranting about animals. He’s the bassist for the Mad Hatters, one of Lou’s bands, and has come on the trip as Lou’s guest along with the Hatters’ guitarist and a girlfriend each. These four are locked in a visceral animal-sighting competition (Structural Fixation: A collective, contextually induced obsession that becomes a temporary locus of greed, competition, and envy). They challenge one another nightly over who saw more and at what range, invoking witnesses from their respective jeeps and promising definitive proof when they develop their film back home.
    Behind Albert sits Cora, the travel agent, and beside her, gazing from his window, is Dean, a blond actor whose genius for stating the obvious—“It’s hot,” or “The sun is setting,” or “There aren’t many trees”—is a staple