Jennifer EganReviewJennifer Egan's prescient earlier novel is intriguingJennifer Egan is so hot right now. Her new book? It's about a model! And the quote on the back saying how marvellous it is? Vogue, darling!
Actually, that's unfair. Jennifer Egan is indeed very hot right now, but she's no mere fashion-froth. Her most recent novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won two of America's most prestigious literary awards – the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Critics Circle award – and received excellent write-ups everywhere. Accordingly, her delighted publishers have trawled her backlist and reissued Look at Me, first published 10 years ago to rather less fanfare.
Egan took six years to write Look at Me, and it shows: this is a sprawling, ambitious novel that links together some of the most diverse characters you could imagine. There is Moose, a middle-aged ex-jock turned erratic history professor, still reeling from an epiphany he experienced years ago, on a grassy bank overlooking the interstate highway. There is Charlotte, a speccy teenager longing for love while her brother recovers from leukaemia. There is a furious Lebanese terrorist, a happily married academic and an unhappily divorced private detective. There is – most strikingly – another, older Charlotte, this one a model from New York who has been in a disastrous car accident. Her face has been reconstructed with 80 titanium screws; once her livelihood, it is now a mask she hides behind as she walks past old friends, even lovers, who show no sign of recognition.
This Charlotte dominates the first half of the book, and her narrative provides most of the fun in the book. Callous, impulsive and selfish (who wants to read about a saintly model?), she tries to claw her way back into the glossy Manhattan fashion circle, but finds her new face no longer passes muster. Her descent into drink, despair and so on could have been clichéd, but Egan gives her much more depth than that.
Charlotte follows in the steps of modern literature's two great Manhattan fast-lane, high-life dumb-asses: John Self, in Martin Amis's Money, and Victor Ward in Bret Easton Ellis's Glamorama. They all think they know the score, and they all have no clue. Charlotte's foible is that she believes she can glimpse people's "shadow selves", the true characters behind their public personas. She's often hilariously wrong, but it shows the importance of seeing and being seen in this very image-conscious book. "Being observed felt like an action, the only one worth taking," Charlotte tells us as she explains why she became a model. "Anything else seemed passive, futile by comparison."
A critic could write a long essay on the novel's sophisticated treatment of perception, image, media and identity. Luckily for you, I won't. What more people have found exciting here is the uncanny way in which many of Egan's futuristic visions have come true.
She began the book in the mid-1990s, long before the US succumbed to reality TV in the form of Survivor (The Real World, their equivalent of Big Brother, was older but not so popular), and when webcams were almost unheard of. And yet here we have a dotcom start-up approaching Charlotte in the hope that she'll let them record and webcast every detail of her daily life: memories, dreams, audio, video. There is a very good – and spookily prescient – scene in which the dotcom's CEO explains to Charlotte how her recordings, and those of other "Ordinary People™", will offer paying viewers access to an authenticity they lack in their own lives. "TV tries to satisfy that, books, movies – they try, but they're all so lame – so mediated! They're just not real enough." Needless to say, his idea of reality includes heavy editing, product endorsement, Hollywood tie-ins, beefed-up drama and tension: "We don't want shit happens, we want shit happens for a reason."
As satire, all this misfires somewhat, since we now know that no one would pay for access to webcasts of someone's daily life and thoughts; why would they, when half the world's population, it seems, is clamouring to tell you about theirs for free? But as a commentary on how our own stories are mediated, commodified and shone back at us as if from a distorting mirror, it's spot-on.
There's a lot more going on here, but some of it may not be of much interest to non-American readers. The town of Rockford, Illinois gets a lot of attention; Moose, the professor, is obsessed with its industrial past, in a rather long-winded, metaphorical way. And there are many more minor characters than I have room to describe. When the climax brings them all together, it feels at once implausible and wearily predictable, as so often with novels that have large casts. But there is a lot here to mull over and enjoy, and if it lacks the pith and zest of Goon Squad, it certainly deserves its second chance on the bookshelves.
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