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Look at Me
Reconstructive facial surgery after a car crash so alters Manhattan model Charlotte Swenson that, within the fashion world, where one's look is oneself, she is unrecognizable. Seeking a new image, Charlotte engages in an Internet experiment that may both save and damn her. As her story eerily converges with that of a plan, unhappy teenager - another Charlotte - it raises tantalizing questions about identity and reality in contemporary Western culture.
Jennifer Egan's bold, innovative novel, demonstrating her virtuosity at weaving a spellbinding, ambitious tale with language that dazzles, captures the spirit of our times and offers an unsettling glimpse of the future.
Jennifer Egan's bold, innovative novel, demonstrating her virtuosity at weaving a spellbinding, ambitious tale with language that dazzles, captures the spirit of our times and offers an unsettling glimpse of the future.
514 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
837 people are currently reading
12010 people want to read
About the author
Jennifer Egan
53 books8,503 followersJennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times book prize, and was named one of the best books of the decade by Time Magazine and Entertainment Weekly. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine, and she recently completed a term as President of PEN America. Her new novel, The Candy House, a sibling to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was published in April, 2022, and was recently named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022, as well as one of President Obama’s favorite reads of 2022.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,560 reviews
June 17, 2020
yay! friends read books togeeeether! and now i can finally link our reviews!
i wish i had read this when it first came out. and i am mad at myself for not loving this book as much as everyone else seems to have - when i read other reviews of it, i am jealous that it didn't grip me as much as it did others, as much as her other books have gripped me.
there are definite strengths here. she demonstrates an uncanny and impressive cultural prescience; the way william gibson predicted the internet, she imagines social networks and reality t.v. before myspace, before facebook. and this book, published only a week after 9/11, has some eerie EERIE terrorist situations and general "america is corrupting and must be brought to its knees" sentiment flooding through it. and that prescience, like the trailer for this movie whose coolest part is now probably going to have to be cut because of horrific events makes the reader uncomfortable, knowing what we now know.
but for me, the multiplicity of storylines, while (mostly) individually fascinating, never really came together. i mean, in the most superficial way they did, as characters' lives intersect unexpectedly, but thematically, there didn't seem to be enough connective tissue. obviously image, perception, "we are who we say we are" certainly does recur, but i was hoping for the moment that makes the multiple narratives necessary, and it just never happened.
when you have as many characters and viewpoints as you do here, some first-person, some third-person, closure becomes a little tricky, and i think some characters did not reach a satisfying resolution. for example, moose, in his final scene. i don't know how to read it.he seems to see it as a triumph, as a hopefulness, but he is subject to the same veiled perception as all of the characters in the book, perhaps more so, and it remains unclear. and charlotte's (model-charlotte's) pre-epilogue final scene is almost exactly like infinite jest, where we are left to fill in the gaps of "how did we get to here from there?" and i'm not sure i understand why ricky was given a discrete narrative, except that it gave her a chance to show off her storytelling skills. as a whole, it never really came together for me, although i liked so many individual parts so much that i feel a little sad only giving out three stars.
the parts that are good are very very good. if i may:
a triumphant homecoming it is not. but it is a recognizable one, and everything is so descriptively razor-sharp it makes me ache.
i loved great chunks of this book. and again, i wish i had read this when it first came out.
but let's see what greg has to say.
come to my blog!
i wish i had read this when it first came out. and i am mad at myself for not loving this book as much as everyone else seems to have - when i read other reviews of it, i am jealous that it didn't grip me as much as it did others, as much as her other books have gripped me.
there are definite strengths here. she demonstrates an uncanny and impressive cultural prescience; the way william gibson predicted the internet, she imagines social networks and reality t.v. before myspace, before facebook. and this book, published only a week after 9/11, has some eerie EERIE terrorist situations and general "america is corrupting and must be brought to its knees" sentiment flooding through it. and that prescience, like the trailer for this movie whose coolest part is now probably going to have to be cut because of horrific events makes the reader uncomfortable, knowing what we now know.
but for me, the multiplicity of storylines, while (mostly) individually fascinating, never really came together. i mean, in the most superficial way they did, as characters' lives intersect unexpectedly, but thematically, there didn't seem to be enough connective tissue. obviously image, perception, "we are who we say we are" certainly does recur, but i was hoping for the moment that makes the multiple narratives necessary, and it just never happened.
when you have as many characters and viewpoints as you do here, some first-person, some third-person, closure becomes a little tricky, and i think some characters did not reach a satisfying resolution. for example, moose, in his final scene. i don't know how to read it.he seems to see it as a triumph, as a hopefulness, but he is subject to the same veiled perception as all of the characters in the book, perhaps more so, and it remains unclear. and charlotte's (model-charlotte's) pre-epilogue final scene is almost exactly like infinite jest, where we are left to fill in the gaps of "how did we get to here from there?" and i'm not sure i understand why ricky was given a discrete narrative, except that it gave her a chance to show off her storytelling skills. as a whole, it never really came together for me, although i liked so many individual parts so much that i feel a little sad only giving out three stars.
the parts that are good are very very good. if i may:
Even as a child, riding home with my mother and Grace after a Saturday in Chicago, new dresses and Frango mints from Marshall Field's packed carefully in our trunk, lunch at the Walnut Room still alive in our minds—even then, when the drive between Rockford and Chicago had encompassed the entire trajectory of my known world, arriving at State Street's outer reaches, at that point practically rural, had roused in me not the lilt of home but a flat dead drone inside my head. Even then, I experienced my return to Rockford as a submersion, a forfeiture of the oxygen of life. And with every subsequent return there had been a flattening, an incursion of dreariness, as I remembered what I had come from and faced it again.
Except now. Today, a silly joy flopped at my heart as I drove past the Clocktower Hotel with its "Museum of Time," past the "Welcome to Rockford" sign, past the Courtyard Inn, the Holiday Inn, the Bombay Bicycle Club, Burger King, Country Kitchen, Red Roof Inn, Gerry's pizza, Mobil, Century 21, Merrill Lynch, Lowe's Gardening and Home Depot. I felt proud of Rockford for appearing on cue and playing its part with such conviction. I had told Irene it would be blighted, bloated, vacant, and now Rockford heaped upon us a quintessentially awful American landscape, the sort of vista that left Europeans ashen-faced: flat, hangar-sized windowless buildings; a swarm of garish plastic signs; miles of parking lot crammed with big American cars throwing jabs of sunlight off their fenders and hubcaps. It was a land without people, save for a few insect-sized humans sprinkled among the parking lots like stand-ins from an architectural scale model, humans diminished to quasi-nonexistence by the gargantuan buildings and giant midwestern sky, pale blue, dotted with tufts of cloud, vast and domineering as skies in Africa.
a triumphant homecoming it is not. but it is a recognizable one, and everything is so descriptively razor-sharp it makes me ache.
i loved great chunks of this book. and again, i wish i had read this when it first came out.
but let's see what greg has to say.
come to my blog!
May 13, 2013
I couldn't wait to finish this book. I just wanted it to end with every turn of the page. Despite the book turning into a perpetual monkey on my back, I was resolute on not giving up on it. It's just not in my genetic make-up to give up and be defeated, even by a densely crap book. Despite the pain, I wanted to keep on reading, not because I wanted to discover what happened, but because I have this 'thing' about half-finished projects, or anything in life, really, and this also goes for books. Just like my morning exercise sessions, no matter the amount of pain, I was determined to get through it.
So what's so bad about this novel that makes me equate it to gruelling bootcamp sessions? Well, firstly, the entire narrative is simply a laborious stream of descriptive brouhaha. There are several key characters, and although we get a detailed glimpse into their psyche and lives, nothing seems to actually HAPPEN to them. The plot is soporifically slow and even though you constantly wait (very patiently!) for something to happen, it never does, just like a bad B-grade movie. I found that whenever I picked up the novel from where I left off, I had NO idea what had previously occurred, so I had to turn back and skim over a couple of past pages just to get the gist of what was going on. Taking out my bookmark and picking up from where I'd finished felt like a monotonous chore. I willed for a bonfire to be lit, just so I could aim the book right into it. Surprisingly, when there was a sudden squirt of action, I found I had NO empathy for the character/s, feeling nothing but indifference towards them. It's rare that I read a book and feel soulless as a result. With 'Look at Me' I didn't feel anything at all - only relief that I had turned another page and was that much closer to the end.
Overall, this novel is 514 pages of self-indulgent artistic sculpturing. The only thing going for the pretentious prose (and to which I give kudos for) is that it is extremely articulate. But well-written? Well, it certainly didn't grab, nor sustain, my immediate attention, and the characters were woefully wooden and two-dimensional, so I would have to say no.
So what's so bad about this novel that makes me equate it to gruelling bootcamp sessions? Well, firstly, the entire narrative is simply a laborious stream of descriptive brouhaha. There are several key characters, and although we get a detailed glimpse into their psyche and lives, nothing seems to actually HAPPEN to them. The plot is soporifically slow and even though you constantly wait (very patiently!) for something to happen, it never does, just like a bad B-grade movie. I found that whenever I picked up the novel from where I left off, I had NO idea what had previously occurred, so I had to turn back and skim over a couple of past pages just to get the gist of what was going on. Taking out my bookmark and picking up from where I'd finished felt like a monotonous chore. I willed for a bonfire to be lit, just so I could aim the book right into it. Surprisingly, when there was a sudden squirt of action, I found I had NO empathy for the character/s, feeling nothing but indifference towards them. It's rare that I read a book and feel soulless as a result. With 'Look at Me' I didn't feel anything at all - only relief that I had turned another page and was that much closer to the end.
Overall, this novel is 514 pages of self-indulgent artistic sculpturing. The only thing going for the pretentious prose (and to which I give kudos for) is that it is extremely articulate. But well-written? Well, it certainly didn't grab, nor sustain, my immediate attention, and the characters were woefully wooden and two-dimensional, so I would have to say no.
June 1, 2015
Given it up. I'm reading A Tiger for Malgudi which is wonderfully written and a genius idea that incorporates a good story, pretty low comedy, philosophy, an unclothed sadhu and a tiger that needs to change its ways. I honestly can't see how Jennifer Egan's writing, at least in Look at Me can be considered excellent and on a par with Narayan's. It's true I've only read about a quarter of the book but it is written as if the heroine (and everyone else) has no inner life other than worrying about vanity and material stuff. There is no wit, no ah-ha enlightening moments, it's just flat.
But it might be that I really do have a taste for literary fiction, classics and mostly factual books and that I am just the wrong audience altogether for such light fiction. Or maybe tastes and standards have changed and it is now anyone who can tell a story reasonably well that is a good writer. A bit like Olive Garden being a good restaurant. But tastes vary from person to person so this is just my opinion.
This is a note for the person who will message me or comment that it is unfair of me to give a 1 star to a book I didn't read it. I always get those people, first cousins to trolls. The 1 star is not for you. It's not for the author, it's for me, it's my rating of the book for me to see and remember. And if that doesn't satisfy you, go and complain on The Lorax along with all the other trolls.
But it might be that I really do have a taste for literary fiction, classics and mostly factual books and that I am just the wrong audience altogether for such light fiction. Or maybe tastes and standards have changed and it is now anyone who can tell a story reasonably well that is a good writer. A bit like Olive Garden being a good restaurant. But tastes vary from person to person so this is just my opinion.
This is a note for the person who will message me or comment that it is unfair of me to give a 1 star to a book I didn't read it. I always get those people, first cousins to trolls. The 1 star is not for you. It's not for the author, it's for me, it's my rating of the book for me to see and remember. And if that doesn't satisfy you, go and complain on The Lorax along with all the other trolls.
August 3, 2013
I am surprised by how much I enjoyed this book.
Reading during one of those godawful endurance tests when works spills well beyond the professional boundaries I've established long ago to keep my job's ruinous hands off the things that make life enjoyable almost always spells disaster for whatever unfortunate book is the victim of bad timing (and often absolutely no free time at all), as late nights and occupational frustration leave little brainpower and less desire to read things I'm not paid to attack with a red pen.
Furthermore, this book smelled of what I suspected to be, despite Jennifer Egan's decidedly admirable reputation, the much-maligned chick lit, a genre in which I have little interest and with which I have virtually no experience. A former model meets with a fiery car accident, with the resulting surgery transforming her into a still-beautiful but unrecognizable creature? A teenage girl is staring down the very experience that will finally propel her from childhood's idyllic innocence into the harsh realities of introductory adulthood? The onetime high-school football star who has embraced his natural place on the fringes of academia? A charmingly damaged private detective? The perennial exotic, mysterious stranger? I was prepared for the marathon eye-rolling sure to follow along with whatever parade of self-fulfilling fantasies was poised to shuffle across more than 400 pages of predictability and pageantry.
And then the book began with a quote from Ulysses, which threw me off entirely (spoiler alert: yeah, pretty sure it's not chick lit). And these characters almost immediately emerged as richly imagined, intricately complex and cautiously likable personalities illustrating a panoply of well-executed themes and generously supported messages that, as demonstrated by this cast embodying a dizzying range of temperaments and impulses, prove the commonality of the human condition, right on down to how closely we guard the private motivations that, were we to give voice to them, would draw us closer to one another in an understanding of recognition. This book, it turns out, has things to say. That are worth saying. And are said well.
It is often the case with nonexistent reading time, which means long lags between putting a book down and picking it up again, that I lose both details and interest that would otherwise be present in a more ideal reading pace, ultimately casting an unearned fog of forgetful disinterest over a story that sputteringly emerges in fits and irregular bursts. While this book is rather chock-full of tiny details that merge to form multidimensional characters at oddly familiar crossroads that result in even more recognizable moments of clarity, they're so well connected that it was difficult to lose track of who did what, what happened to whom, and how some subtle detail presented pages and weeks ago had propelled the story along its only logical trajectory. What's more, each long-overdue return to this book felt less like a desperate flurry of forced refamiliarization and more like being welcomed by patient acquaintances who knew exactly where we left off and resumed their narrative threads without either the confusion or faltering steps of gap-marked memory that so often happen when a book can start to feel abandoned.
There are times when characters seem to exist merely as vehicles for the plot, and there are times when plot exists simply to give the characters a reason to be written: This is the perfect middle ground between such off-putting extremes. Each of the main characters (and most of the supporting ones) continue to be fleshed out as the novel forges ahead, and each of their stories gradually interlock or refasten after being pulled apart long ago or make their way to a crescendo of connection. The parallels of growth and discovery in both the players and their plays create a not unpleasant sense of being overwhelmed by the places life takes us and the ups and downs of getting there, serving as a keen reminder that the destination is not a full stop but rather a shift in existence that needs to be taken into account and calls for an adjustment if it is to be allowed the awesome force of realization it is intended to be. Personal evolution doesn't just happen: It is the correct response to those predetermined moments that can either bring the needed change to thrive or swallow a person whole because they'd rather stand in place than take a chance on self-discovery.
It's not like change is easy, especially when it's a necessity of circumstance rather than a luxury of choice. Like bucking up and moving on from a tragedy, be it a self-contained one demanding physical recovery or the universally understood ache of young love (or soul-baring infatuation, as it so often truly is) that flees just as quickly as it descends, leaving behind a newly guarded heart sore with the implicit realization that things will never be the same again. The changes this novel's characters undergo highlight the ongoing battle of minimizing the divide between the Old Self and New Self, how every newly shed identity must find its place among all the outdated incarnations of the self to comprise a single ghost, how difficult it can be to honor the past without living in it so as not to stunt the growth of the present, and eventually future, self. The present is destined to join the composite of the past, which exists alongside every new self, and it is a thing we can never truly shed or hide because it is apparent in the memories that shape our resolute cores of being, regardless of whether we choose to embrace or deny the selves that were.
Most of all, as suggested by such an imploringly imperative title, this is a book about recognition. Whether a character's metamorphosis is sudden, violent, inevitable, an acceptance of maturity or a refusal to exist within the confines of one identity for too long, validation through another's affirmation is the only real measurement of a transformation's success. We can always recognize ourselves, even though we are the only ones aware of our most infinitesimal changes: It is through others that we see where and how well we fit, if at all, into the cogs of greater existence.
Reading during one of those godawful endurance tests when works spills well beyond the professional boundaries I've established long ago to keep my job's ruinous hands off the things that make life enjoyable almost always spells disaster for whatever unfortunate book is the victim of bad timing (and often absolutely no free time at all), as late nights and occupational frustration leave little brainpower and less desire to read things I'm not paid to attack with a red pen.
Furthermore, this book smelled of what I suspected to be, despite Jennifer Egan's decidedly admirable reputation, the much-maligned chick lit, a genre in which I have little interest and with which I have virtually no experience. A former model meets with a fiery car accident, with the resulting surgery transforming her into a still-beautiful but unrecognizable creature? A teenage girl is staring down the very experience that will finally propel her from childhood's idyllic innocence into the harsh realities of introductory adulthood? The onetime high-school football star who has embraced his natural place on the fringes of academia? A charmingly damaged private detective? The perennial exotic, mysterious stranger? I was prepared for the marathon eye-rolling sure to follow along with whatever parade of self-fulfilling fantasies was poised to shuffle across more than 400 pages of predictability and pageantry.
And then the book began with a quote from Ulysses, which threw me off entirely (spoiler alert: yeah, pretty sure it's not chick lit). And these characters almost immediately emerged as richly imagined, intricately complex and cautiously likable personalities illustrating a panoply of well-executed themes and generously supported messages that, as demonstrated by this cast embodying a dizzying range of temperaments and impulses, prove the commonality of the human condition, right on down to how closely we guard the private motivations that, were we to give voice to them, would draw us closer to one another in an understanding of recognition. This book, it turns out, has things to say. That are worth saying. And are said well.
It is often the case with nonexistent reading time, which means long lags between putting a book down and picking it up again, that I lose both details and interest that would otherwise be present in a more ideal reading pace, ultimately casting an unearned fog of forgetful disinterest over a story that sputteringly emerges in fits and irregular bursts. While this book is rather chock-full of tiny details that merge to form multidimensional characters at oddly familiar crossroads that result in even more recognizable moments of clarity, they're so well connected that it was difficult to lose track of who did what, what happened to whom, and how some subtle detail presented pages and weeks ago had propelled the story along its only logical trajectory. What's more, each long-overdue return to this book felt less like a desperate flurry of forced refamiliarization and more like being welcomed by patient acquaintances who knew exactly where we left off and resumed their narrative threads without either the confusion or faltering steps of gap-marked memory that so often happen when a book can start to feel abandoned.
There are times when characters seem to exist merely as vehicles for the plot, and there are times when plot exists simply to give the characters a reason to be written: This is the perfect middle ground between such off-putting extremes. Each of the main characters (and most of the supporting ones) continue to be fleshed out as the novel forges ahead, and each of their stories gradually interlock or refasten after being pulled apart long ago or make their way to a crescendo of connection. The parallels of growth and discovery in both the players and their plays create a not unpleasant sense of being overwhelmed by the places life takes us and the ups and downs of getting there, serving as a keen reminder that the destination is not a full stop but rather a shift in existence that needs to be taken into account and calls for an adjustment if it is to be allowed the awesome force of realization it is intended to be. Personal evolution doesn't just happen: It is the correct response to those predetermined moments that can either bring the needed change to thrive or swallow a person whole because they'd rather stand in place than take a chance on self-discovery.
It's not like change is easy, especially when it's a necessity of circumstance rather than a luxury of choice. Like bucking up and moving on from a tragedy, be it a self-contained one demanding physical recovery or the universally understood ache of young love (or soul-baring infatuation, as it so often truly is) that flees just as quickly as it descends, leaving behind a newly guarded heart sore with the implicit realization that things will never be the same again. The changes this novel's characters undergo highlight the ongoing battle of minimizing the divide between the Old Self and New Self, how every newly shed identity must find its place among all the outdated incarnations of the self to comprise a single ghost, how difficult it can be to honor the past without living in it so as not to stunt the growth of the present, and eventually future, self. The present is destined to join the composite of the past, which exists alongside every new self, and it is a thing we can never truly shed or hide because it is apparent in the memories that shape our resolute cores of being, regardless of whether we choose to embrace or deny the selves that were.
Most of all, as suggested by such an imploringly imperative title, this is a book about recognition. Whether a character's metamorphosis is sudden, violent, inevitable, an acceptance of maturity or a refusal to exist within the confines of one identity for too long, validation through another's affirmation is the only real measurement of a transformation's success. We can always recognize ourselves, even though we are the only ones aware of our most infinitesimal changes: It is through others that we see where and how well we fit, if at all, into the cogs of greater existence.
September 24, 2012
Karen and I read this book at roughly the same time. Read her review here.
Look at Me I'm giving a weak four stars, if there were half-stars it would be a three and a half. Right after I finished reading this I started Egan's collection of short stories Emerald City, and I'm happy I gave Look at Me four stars, so that I could give the story collection three stars and feel like the three Egan books I've read are clearly rated according to my enjoyment of them. I don't know what will happen if I read one of her other two novels though. I don't own either of them though so it will probably be awhile before I have to worry about that difficulty.
I've never read Invisible Monsters, but in my head I always sort of thought of them as the same book, but one with a whole lot of shock for the sake of being shocking and the other a more 'lady' book. That was before I realized that Jennifer Egan is actually not a nice genteel writer. She has some punch to her, too. Both are about disfigured models though, and probably satires / commentaries on the media and celebrity culture.
The book itself? The parts were better than the whole. I generally liked all the story lines and the way the characters were portrayed. I liked the way she kept switching up the story and changed the voice the narrative was told in for the different threads. But I didn't feel like the book ever came together. It felt like Egan went the 'safe' route. She choose to sort of bring the threads of the story together, as to satisfy some kind of closure or culmination of the various parts, but it didn't feel like enough of a tying together to feel really satisfying. If she had tied them together more neatly though there would have been a huge level of coincidence and suspension of belief needed to buy into what Egan was trying to sell. She sort of went the middle route of just leaving the threads dangling and tying it all up too neatly, but it felt a little too forced ().
Looking at when this book got released, it's somewhat interesting in a coincidental way that it was published on September 18th, 2001. There is definitely something 9/11 to the book. If it had been released a year later parts of it would feel really forced and trite. These parts of the book though I had some of the biggest problems with, I had a hard time accepting the character in the book, and I grudgingly was ok with it as the book wrapped up, but there was still something very unbelievable about the character. Actually, a couple of characters had this problem of just being a bit too unbelievable. I can be a very gullible reader though and accept things without getting too worked up about how things don't conform to how things really are.*
The central theme to the book is how the self relates to the other, the world. There are lots of things going on, but to me it was mainly an American version of what French philosophers love to babble on and on about. It sounds superficial, and maybe this book is a critique of this superficiality, or maybe it's just pointing out that this is the way things are is that how other people see you is important. The inner-self, what some of us hold really dear and important is just what fucks us up. It brings destruction, fuels rage, and alienates. That it's as much of a lie of authenticity as media hyper-reality.
Reader group question:
1. Compare and contrast Moose's antics at Yale to the Fashion Photographer who has a model's face cut with razor blades so there is real blood in the shoot.
2. Two settings are important in the book, New York City and Rockford, Illinois. Which is more Real in an authenticity manner of using the word real (but for the sake of your reading group it might be better not to consider dwelling on a Lacanian use of the term)?
3. Is there a vast American Conspiracy of hegemony at work in the world? If so, is it consciously or unconsciously being carried out? Or is it something as possibly nefarious as a conspiracy but rather something about people that has this desire for hegemony? As a corollary question why would an American tourist eat at restaurants like The Olive Garden, Red Lobster and McDonalds when they visit New York City?
An aside that goes along with the book.
Sometimes the books I'm reading collide with what's going on in my life. Sometimes they slightly remind me of something going on in the gossipy side of goodreads so I end up writing long winded things about that and pass them off as reviews. This isn't going to be that.
An important part of this book is Celebrity Culture. Celebrities are people like you and me but they are seen by more people. People want to see them. No one (or not very many people) want to see you. I include myself. No one really wants to see me, I'm just there filling up space, doing the small functions of keeping books readily available for people to buy them and showing people where those books are when they can't figure it out themselves. That is the end of my general importance to other people. It's a cynical way of looking at things, but it's fairly true.
No it's a lie.
I'm more than that. I also cause some kind of reaction in people through writing these things. Mostly, I'm guessing that my reviews go fairly unread, people who 'know' me just click like after quickly skimming what I've written. Some people might read everything in a review. Some people see my reviews in places other than goodreads and then sign up for the site for the purpose of telling me what an awful person I am. Some people decide they want to be my friend after reading something I've written, or because I'm in the 'celebrity' class of goodreads (being that I'm listed as one of the top reviewers), or they just follow me because of the very deceptive fact that I'm listed as a top reviewer (I'm probably the least popular, popular reviewer on the list, my individual reviews don't get the numbers that other reviewers do, and I can think of at least ten people who write reviews that consistently are more popular than most anything I write, but they don't have the quantity of reviews to get them listed), some just follow me (and when I click on these people most of them time they are also following all the rest of the usual top reviewers). Some people probably hate me and my reviews and just never bother to let me know it.
Of course what anyone reads in my reviews isn't really me. It's a mediated version of myself. It's a mixture of what I want people to know, what I unconsciously probably reveal and whatever the person reading what I've written thinks that I am and fits me accordingly into that notion. Even when I might sound like I'm being very truthful I'm lying to some extent and creating an image that doesn't correspond to anything real. Or if it is something real, it's a phantom entity called something like, Greg who writes reviews on Goodreads.
I'm only thinking of myself in this way because of my 8-hour shift yesterday that was an immersion into being in the presence of a real celebrity. It kind of hurt my head to try to fathom why people act the way they do about celebrities. The celebrity in question was Johnny Depp, who was at our store to interview Damien Echols in a live event. Echols was there promoting his book. Depp was there to wear a funny looking hat and ask him some questions in a bizarre voice that sounded like someone unable to figure out if they wanted to talk like a bad Native American stereotype or someone from England. Johnny Depp wasn't signing anything. There was going to be no chance to meet him. He showed up right before the event started, went on stage, did his interview and then left.
People waited all day for this event. People mobbed the front of the store with cameras in case he went in the front door. Smarter people mobbed the back door with cameras. People who couldn't get on the floor where the event was being held swarmed around the escalators to catch him while he came or left. People (ok a person) said, "I don't care at all about Johnny Depp." (then why are you here when you don't work here?) and then let out a shriek that probably deafened dogs and was only barely audible to humans when you saw your chance to catch him as he was heading towards the green room, with your camera phone out and ready to snap some pictures.
Of course with my shitty paying job I would have a chance to 'see' Johnny Depp. I was working on the floor where the event was held. I could walk past security. I could shelve books a few feet from where he was hanging out before going on stage. I truly didn't care though. I was sort of surprised when I saw him walk by me that he was a real sized person (I expected him to be short, like so many celebrities seem to be in person, apparently Dave Navarro conformed to this rule, but I didn't see him at the event). I'm fairly cynical when it comes to celebrities, most of them I just don't care much about. Maybe it's the residual hatred of 'rock-stars' that punk distilled in me, maybe it's something else. But it's not that I had any animosity towards Johnny Depp, or any of the people who were waiting to see him, or mis-stragically placed throughout the store hoping to have him pass by**
But what is the point of having him pass by you? Lots of people were there waiting for him. They waited hours for him. It was known that he wasn't going to sign anything. You weren't going to get to meet him. Why wait? Why hope to snap a picture? When you yell out "I love you Johnny" and he turns around gives a smile and a wave, is that worth the hours? (oh and stopping to look at things, for about a second or two he did stop and look at one of your tables, Karen).
As much of a waste of time it seems to me to wait hours to get to meet someone for a second and have a book signed, waiting hours to just see someone hopefully walk past you is even more baffling to me. I get the first, I don't feel the urge to meet celebrities myself, but I get the feeling. I swarmed around the Penguin booth at BEA hoping that I could catch Zadie Smith not in a meeting with someone from the publisher and maybe try to meet her (I don't know what I would have said to her, so it's probably best that she was busy). It's irrational, there is nothing to be gained by getting to meet her, but I get the idea that you admire someone and you want to meet them, want to know that for a few seconds the person that you 'see' sees you, too. Is that what people were hoping to get out of the half a second the Johnny Depp would pass them by? Were they hoping that he would stop just for them? That he would turn out to be an alright kind of guy who would stop and meet his fans? Would it have just been to give oneself a feeling of for a moment not being ordinary by being in the presence of someone who is more than real? Sharing in the celebrity when you can post the paparazzi like picture you snapped on Twitter or Facebook? Or maybe even better if you could get him to stop and have a picture snapped by a friend with you standing with your arm around his shoulder?
Look at Me, Johnny?
*A hypotheses. Are people who nitpick on the reality of characters and places more likely to read only 'dead' authors. Books written in times and places that the reader knows nothing about and are more willing to accept as 'accurate' because of the canonization of the work and the author?
**In case you want to stalk a big celebrity at our store (who shows up for an event, not that shops here, sometimes they do shop at the store though, but it's probably not worth hanging out waiting for one), they will most likely not come in through the front door. They will not use the escalators, or the elevators. If they do use the elevators you will not be able to get on one with them, or catch them waiting for an elevator. I hate to see people doing futile things, so if it's your dream of getting a blurry photo of someone like Johnny Depp as he walks past you while at our store don't wait around the escalators. It just breaks my heart to see you hopelessly waiting in a spot he will never go past.
Look at Me I'm giving a weak four stars, if there were half-stars it would be a three and a half. Right after I finished reading this I started Egan's collection of short stories Emerald City, and I'm happy I gave Look at Me four stars, so that I could give the story collection three stars and feel like the three Egan books I've read are clearly rated according to my enjoyment of them. I don't know what will happen if I read one of her other two novels though. I don't own either of them though so it will probably be awhile before I have to worry about that difficulty.
I've never read Invisible Monsters, but in my head I always sort of thought of them as the same book, but one with a whole lot of shock for the sake of being shocking and the other a more 'lady' book. That was before I realized that Jennifer Egan is actually not a nice genteel writer. She has some punch to her, too. Both are about disfigured models though, and probably satires / commentaries on the media and celebrity culture.
The book itself? The parts were better than the whole. I generally liked all the story lines and the way the characters were portrayed. I liked the way she kept switching up the story and changed the voice the narrative was told in for the different threads. But I didn't feel like the book ever came together. It felt like Egan went the 'safe' route. She choose to sort of bring the threads of the story together, as to satisfy some kind of closure or culmination of the various parts, but it didn't feel like enough of a tying together to feel really satisfying. If she had tied them together more neatly though there would have been a huge level of coincidence and suspension of belief needed to buy into what Egan was trying to sell. She sort of went the middle route of just leaving the threads dangling and tying it all up too neatly, but it felt a little too forced ().
Looking at when this book got released, it's somewhat interesting in a coincidental way that it was published on September 18th, 2001. There is definitely something 9/11 to the book. If it had been released a year later parts of it would feel really forced and trite. These parts of the book though I had some of the biggest problems with, I had a hard time accepting the character in the book, and I grudgingly was ok with it as the book wrapped up, but there was still something very unbelievable about the character. Actually, a couple of characters had this problem of just being a bit too unbelievable. I can be a very gullible reader though and accept things without getting too worked up about how things don't conform to how things really are.*
The central theme to the book is how the self relates to the other, the world. There are lots of things going on, but to me it was mainly an American version of what French philosophers love to babble on and on about. It sounds superficial, and maybe this book is a critique of this superficiality, or maybe it's just pointing out that this is the way things are is that how other people see you is important. The inner-self, what some of us hold really dear and important is just what fucks us up. It brings destruction, fuels rage, and alienates. That it's as much of a lie of authenticity as media hyper-reality.
Reader group question:
1. Compare and contrast Moose's antics at Yale to the Fashion Photographer who has a model's face cut with razor blades so there is real blood in the shoot.
2. Two settings are important in the book, New York City and Rockford, Illinois. Which is more Real in an authenticity manner of using the word real (but for the sake of your reading group it might be better not to consider dwelling on a Lacanian use of the term)?
3. Is there a vast American Conspiracy of hegemony at work in the world? If so, is it consciously or unconsciously being carried out? Or is it something as possibly nefarious as a conspiracy but rather something about people that has this desire for hegemony? As a corollary question why would an American tourist eat at restaurants like The Olive Garden, Red Lobster and McDonalds when they visit New York City?
An aside that goes along with the book.
Sometimes the books I'm reading collide with what's going on in my life. Sometimes they slightly remind me of something going on in the gossipy side of goodreads so I end up writing long winded things about that and pass them off as reviews. This isn't going to be that.
An important part of this book is Celebrity Culture. Celebrities are people like you and me but they are seen by more people. People want to see them. No one (or not very many people) want to see you. I include myself. No one really wants to see me, I'm just there filling up space, doing the small functions of keeping books readily available for people to buy them and showing people where those books are when they can't figure it out themselves. That is the end of my general importance to other people. It's a cynical way of looking at things, but it's fairly true.
No it's a lie.
I'm more than that. I also cause some kind of reaction in people through writing these things. Mostly, I'm guessing that my reviews go fairly unread, people who 'know' me just click like after quickly skimming what I've written. Some people might read everything in a review. Some people see my reviews in places other than goodreads and then sign up for the site for the purpose of telling me what an awful person I am. Some people decide they want to be my friend after reading something I've written, or because I'm in the 'celebrity' class of goodreads (being that I'm listed as one of the top reviewers), or they just follow me because of the very deceptive fact that I'm listed as a top reviewer (I'm probably the least popular, popular reviewer on the list, my individual reviews don't get the numbers that other reviewers do, and I can think of at least ten people who write reviews that consistently are more popular than most anything I write, but they don't have the quantity of reviews to get them listed), some just follow me (and when I click on these people most of them time they are also following all the rest of the usual top reviewers). Some people probably hate me and my reviews and just never bother to let me know it.
Of course what anyone reads in my reviews isn't really me. It's a mediated version of myself. It's a mixture of what I want people to know, what I unconsciously probably reveal and whatever the person reading what I've written thinks that I am and fits me accordingly into that notion. Even when I might sound like I'm being very truthful I'm lying to some extent and creating an image that doesn't correspond to anything real. Or if it is something real, it's a phantom entity called something like, Greg who writes reviews on Goodreads.
I'm only thinking of myself in this way because of my 8-hour shift yesterday that was an immersion into being in the presence of a real celebrity. It kind of hurt my head to try to fathom why people act the way they do about celebrities. The celebrity in question was Johnny Depp, who was at our store to interview Damien Echols in a live event. Echols was there promoting his book. Depp was there to wear a funny looking hat and ask him some questions in a bizarre voice that sounded like someone unable to figure out if they wanted to talk like a bad Native American stereotype or someone from England. Johnny Depp wasn't signing anything. There was going to be no chance to meet him. He showed up right before the event started, went on stage, did his interview and then left.
People waited all day for this event. People mobbed the front of the store with cameras in case he went in the front door. Smarter people mobbed the back door with cameras. People who couldn't get on the floor where the event was being held swarmed around the escalators to catch him while he came or left. People (ok a person) said, "I don't care at all about Johnny Depp." (then why are you here when you don't work here?) and then let out a shriek that probably deafened dogs and was only barely audible to humans when you saw your chance to catch him as he was heading towards the green room, with your camera phone out and ready to snap some pictures.
Of course with my shitty paying job I would have a chance to 'see' Johnny Depp. I was working on the floor where the event was held. I could walk past security. I could shelve books a few feet from where he was hanging out before going on stage. I truly didn't care though. I was sort of surprised when I saw him walk by me that he was a real sized person (I expected him to be short, like so many celebrities seem to be in person, apparently Dave Navarro conformed to this rule, but I didn't see him at the event). I'm fairly cynical when it comes to celebrities, most of them I just don't care much about. Maybe it's the residual hatred of 'rock-stars' that punk distilled in me, maybe it's something else. But it's not that I had any animosity towards Johnny Depp, or any of the people who were waiting to see him, or mis-stragically placed throughout the store hoping to have him pass by**
But what is the point of having him pass by you? Lots of people were there waiting for him. They waited hours for him. It was known that he wasn't going to sign anything. You weren't going to get to meet him. Why wait? Why hope to snap a picture? When you yell out "I love you Johnny" and he turns around gives a smile and a wave, is that worth the hours? (oh and stopping to look at things, for about a second or two he did stop and look at one of your tables, Karen).
As much of a waste of time it seems to me to wait hours to get to meet someone for a second and have a book signed, waiting hours to just see someone hopefully walk past you is even more baffling to me. I get the first, I don't feel the urge to meet celebrities myself, but I get the feeling. I swarmed around the Penguin booth at BEA hoping that I could catch Zadie Smith not in a meeting with someone from the publisher and maybe try to meet her (I don't know what I would have said to her, so it's probably best that she was busy). It's irrational, there is nothing to be gained by getting to meet her, but I get the idea that you admire someone and you want to meet them, want to know that for a few seconds the person that you 'see' sees you, too. Is that what people were hoping to get out of the half a second the Johnny Depp would pass them by? Were they hoping that he would stop just for them? That he would turn out to be an alright kind of guy who would stop and meet his fans? Would it have just been to give oneself a feeling of for a moment not being ordinary by being in the presence of someone who is more than real? Sharing in the celebrity when you can post the paparazzi like picture you snapped on Twitter or Facebook? Or maybe even better if you could get him to stop and have a picture snapped by a friend with you standing with your arm around his shoulder?
Look at Me, Johnny?
*A hypotheses. Are people who nitpick on the reality of characters and places more likely to read only 'dead' authors. Books written in times and places that the reader knows nothing about and are more willing to accept as 'accurate' because of the canonization of the work and the author?
**In case you want to stalk a big celebrity at our store (who shows up for an event, not that shops here, sometimes they do shop at the store though, but it's probably not worth hanging out waiting for one), they will most likely not come in through the front door. They will not use the escalators, or the elevators. If they do use the elevators you will not be able to get on one with them, or catch them waiting for an elevator. I hate to see people doing futile things, so if it's your dream of getting a blurry photo of someone like Johnny Depp as he walks past you while at our store don't wait around the escalators. It just breaks my heart to see you hopelessly waiting in a spot he will never go past.
June 30, 2013
At the end of Look at Me there is an afterword from Jennifer Egan, explaining that she finished the final revision of the novel in January 2001. She goes on to say that the character of the terrorist who appears in the book, and the book itself, would have had to be entirely reconceived if it had still been a work in progress on September 11 of that year. No doubt this is true; after that, all writers became post-9/11 writers whether they wanted to or not. But the slight whiff of apology that emanates from her afterword seems to me entirely unnecessary. The novel actually is the opposite of dated; it's incredibly prescient.
This is an extremely smart, insightful, serious, compelling book. A story of irresistible forward momentum, and full of ideas. The central character, Charlotte Swenson, is an ultra-successful fashion model who almost dies in a terrible car accident that smashes up her face so that it has to be put back together with eighty titanium screws. After this, she is no longer recognizable as the Charlotte she was, and her modeling career has to be reinvented -- if it can be. So Egan sets the story in motion, and so, simultaneously, she sets in motion her book-long meditation-through-action on our culture of seeing and being seen. Near the end, one of the characters reflects on the obsessive insight that came to him when he discovered that clear glass was perfected in Murano circa 1300: "The birth of clear sight, of people's awareness of their outward selves -- these seemed the origins of a phenomenon whose reach extended all the way to the present day -- screens, frames, images -- a world constructed and lived from the outside." Look at Me is a vision of the Zeitgeist, a powerful critique of the culture we become more enmeshed in day by day. It is that ambitious a book, and it's up to the task it sets itself.
But don't imagine that it's a thematically heavy-handed tract; it's a story driven by love, sex, mortality, greed, jealousy and bad judgment -- everything you could want in a novel worth reading.
I can't resist quoting the sentence I can't stop thinking about: "It was all right there, the narrative of industrial America told in these glyphs: a tale that began with the rationalization of objects through standardization, abstraction and mass production, and concluded with the rationalization of human beings through marketing, public relations, image consulting and spin." The passage of twelve years since the book was written necessitates only one addition to the concluding list: social media -- a development which only redoubles the power of every process Egan describes.
The rationalization of human beings: if this doesn't seem frightening, then one must already have been successfully rationalized. And the question of course is, rationalized by whom? Not by oneself (which would be deprivation enough) but by those who do the marketing, PR, image consulting and spin (yes, they appear as characters in this novel).
"A world constructed *and lived* from the outside": one in which the rationalized human being no longer has an inner life, but becomes the spectator of its own image, so that in the end the surveillance is conducted by oneself. It's called Facebook.
Somehow, Jennifer Egan was on to all this in 2001 and the six preceding years during which she wrote this book. It's a hopeful sign that she has had success. The fact that people are reading this tells you that we have not yet utterly capitulated. In my view it is the job of literature to keep alive the capacity and the burning need to have an inner life.
This is an extremely smart, insightful, serious, compelling book. A story of irresistible forward momentum, and full of ideas. The central character, Charlotte Swenson, is an ultra-successful fashion model who almost dies in a terrible car accident that smashes up her face so that it has to be put back together with eighty titanium screws. After this, she is no longer recognizable as the Charlotte she was, and her modeling career has to be reinvented -- if it can be. So Egan sets the story in motion, and so, simultaneously, she sets in motion her book-long meditation-through-action on our culture of seeing and being seen. Near the end, one of the characters reflects on the obsessive insight that came to him when he discovered that clear glass was perfected in Murano circa 1300: "The birth of clear sight, of people's awareness of their outward selves -- these seemed the origins of a phenomenon whose reach extended all the way to the present day -- screens, frames, images -- a world constructed and lived from the outside." Look at Me is a vision of the Zeitgeist, a powerful critique of the culture we become more enmeshed in day by day. It is that ambitious a book, and it's up to the task it sets itself.
But don't imagine that it's a thematically heavy-handed tract; it's a story driven by love, sex, mortality, greed, jealousy and bad judgment -- everything you could want in a novel worth reading.
I can't resist quoting the sentence I can't stop thinking about: "It was all right there, the narrative of industrial America told in these glyphs: a tale that began with the rationalization of objects through standardization, abstraction and mass production, and concluded with the rationalization of human beings through marketing, public relations, image consulting and spin." The passage of twelve years since the book was written necessitates only one addition to the concluding list: social media -- a development which only redoubles the power of every process Egan describes.
The rationalization of human beings: if this doesn't seem frightening, then one must already have been successfully rationalized. And the question of course is, rationalized by whom? Not by oneself (which would be deprivation enough) but by those who do the marketing, PR, image consulting and spin (yes, they appear as characters in this novel).
"A world constructed *and lived* from the outside": one in which the rationalized human being no longer has an inner life, but becomes the spectator of its own image, so that in the end the surveillance is conducted by oneself. It's called Facebook.
Somehow, Jennifer Egan was on to all this in 2001 and the six preceding years during which she wrote this book. It's a hopeful sign that she has had success. The fact that people are reading this tells you that we have not yet utterly capitulated. In my view it is the job of literature to keep alive the capacity and the burning need to have an inner life.
July 2, 2012
Re-reading!
***
I am so hot for Jennifer Egan right now. As I read this book (about a whole lot more than a model who gets a new face after a car accident, by the way), I often had to stop and admire the fluidity of Egan's narrative, how she moved in and out of action, in and out of flashback, in and out of a character's head. This book seemed so effortless, yet complicated, and I learned a lot about novel-making from reading it.
There was a chunk of about 60 pages near the end when I suddenly was tired of the book, exhausted by the prose (a pretty sentence everywhere I looked), and trying hard not to skim. This was a shock, since before that I was reading the book whenever I had a free moment. I think the problem stems from Egan suddenly focusing on characters whom I didn't care to know more about.
Also, I was reading the hardcover edition and there's a great error on page 202, when someone is perusing a "desert menu". Ha ha!
***
I am so hot for Jennifer Egan right now. As I read this book (about a whole lot more than a model who gets a new face after a car accident, by the way), I often had to stop and admire the fluidity of Egan's narrative, how she moved in and out of action, in and out of flashback, in and out of a character's head. This book seemed so effortless, yet complicated, and I learned a lot about novel-making from reading it.
There was a chunk of about 60 pages near the end when I suddenly was tired of the book, exhausted by the prose (a pretty sentence everywhere I looked), and trying hard not to skim. This was a shock, since before that I was reading the book whenever I had a free moment. I think the problem stems from Egan suddenly focusing on characters whom I didn't care to know more about.
Also, I was reading the hardcover edition and there's a great error on page 202, when someone is perusing a "desert menu". Ha ha!
May 17, 2025
I loved the prose, and the characters were very complex, each one representative of what is wrong in the world today. Even the minor characters like the North Korean model, the photographer, and agent are all deeply symbolic of the cruelty and commoditization of beauty, the erasure of individuality, and the carelessness of consumerism. Now multiply that with the weight each of the more prominent characters carry, and it might understand why I say this book was difficult to read.
It was also smart and satisfying by the end, though I don’t love that Z is a Middle Eastern Muslim man. I think it runs the danger of perpetuating unfair stereotypes. I also hated his relationship with young Charlotte, even though I understand why Egan went there for the necessity of his own character’s inspection and ultimate growth. Young Charlotte, on the other hand, starts out too grownup and has to find her journey back to being a “normal” kid.
The ending was expected but also exactly the way the book needed to close. Anything else would’ve betrayed all the many nuanced and complicated layers Egan spent so much time building in.
Some characters actually diminish in integrity further than I’d think was warranted, like Irene, but again, I can see the deliberate choices Egan made even here. Even the title is perfect.
I feel about this book the same way I do about Birnam Wood - cerebral, satiating, accurate, pathetic (in that it invokes a lot of sympathy from me), twisty, and back on my shelf to be read again some day.
It was also smart and satisfying by the end, though I don’t love that Z is a Middle Eastern Muslim man. I think it runs the danger of perpetuating unfair stereotypes. I also hated his relationship with young Charlotte, even though I understand why Egan went there for the necessity of his own character’s inspection and ultimate growth. Young Charlotte, on the other hand, starts out too grownup and has to find her journey back to being a “normal” kid.
The ending was expected but also exactly the way the book needed to close. Anything else would’ve betrayed all the many nuanced and complicated layers Egan spent so much time building in.
Some characters actually diminish in integrity further than I’d think was warranted, like Irene, but again, I can see the deliberate choices Egan made even here. Even the title is perfect.
I feel about this book the same way I do about Birnam Wood - cerebral, satiating, accurate, pathetic (in that it invokes a lot of sympathy from me), twisty, and back on my shelf to be read again some day.
January 9, 2012
A massively over-written novel which would have benefited from a less wordy author and/or a competent editor. Egan never bothers to use one word where sixteen flowery, uber-lyrical, overblown words will do. Convoluted sentences and showy vocabulary add little - indeed, they become nugatory and self-defeating. Odd, really, given the snappiness of Goon Squad (that horrendous, anal Powerpoint nonsense excepted) but perhaps Egan has now learned to refine and streamline her style - or found herself a decent editor.
That rather major qualm apart, the book is a compelling take on how looks affect the way we behave and how others treat and perceive us. In addition to its many other themes - attraction, teenage obsession, illness, intellectual overload leading to meltdown, a vague reference to terrorism - its most interesting strand is its prescience about the Facebook society (given that it was written 10 years ago).
A good read but it would have been twice the book at half the length.
That rather major qualm apart, the book is a compelling take on how looks affect the way we behave and how others treat and perceive us. In addition to its many other themes - attraction, teenage obsession, illness, intellectual overload leading to meltdown, a vague reference to terrorism - its most interesting strand is its prescience about the Facebook society (given that it was written 10 years ago).
A good read but it would have been twice the book at half the length.
September 29, 2024
One of the creepiest and most unnerving novels I've read about dual characters that mirror one another, I want to first write that "Look at Me" might as well be re-titled the "The Two Charlottes".
Fashion model Charlotte Swenson is a survivor of a horrific car accident which has caused surgeons to fix her disfigured and gorgeous face with titanium screws.
Charlotte Hauser is the teenage daughter of Ellen Metcalf's, Charlotte's former best friend in Rockford, Illinois. Charlotte Hauser is an outsider, precocious, and winds up seducing her eccentric Uncle Moose, Ellen's history buff of a brother; and hapless math teacher Michael West.
Charlotte Swenson finds herself rewriting her own narrative, and of her own accident, becoming involved with private detective Anthony Halliday; journalist and academic Irene Maitland, culminating with the mysterious "Z", revealed as Aziz who is one of the catalysts that drive the plot towards the pivotal car accident.
Both Charlottes are a study in loneliness, alienation, not fitting in; both seduce men who have weaknesses and other complexities in their own lives, making the male characters just as compelling as these two women.
Fashion model Charlotte Swenson is a survivor of a horrific car accident which has caused surgeons to fix her disfigured and gorgeous face with titanium screws.
Charlotte Hauser is the teenage daughter of Ellen Metcalf's, Charlotte's former best friend in Rockford, Illinois. Charlotte Hauser is an outsider, precocious, and winds up seducing her eccentric Uncle Moose, Ellen's history buff of a brother; and hapless math teacher Michael West.
Charlotte Swenson finds herself rewriting her own narrative, and of her own accident, becoming involved with private detective Anthony Halliday; journalist and academic Irene Maitland, culminating with the mysterious "Z", revealed as Aziz who is one of the catalysts that drive the plot towards the pivotal car accident.
Both Charlottes are a study in loneliness, alienation, not fitting in; both seduce men who have weaknesses and other complexities in their own lives, making the male characters just as compelling as these two women.
October 1, 2012
I wish I had given up on this book at the halfway point. I kept waiting for something to happen. . .something that I cared about. . . but nothing ever did. I found the book overly dramatic and I didn't care about any of the drama. I didn't care about any character in the book and had no way to relate to them. The characters I cared most about were not really in the story, i.e., Anthony Halladay's estranged wife, maybe even Halladay himself, the students Moose terrorized at Yale, the Korean child Kim basically stolen from her family to be used as a model in New York, maybe even young Charlotte Metcalf's little brother Ricky. Ellen Metcalf would have been a more interesting character than fashion model Charlotte Swenson. Many of the things that happened in the book didn't seem real and I kept thinking 'this is not how real people act' and it was so distracting that is was hard to concentrate on the story, i.e., Charlotte Swenson spitting tequila into a recovering alcoholic's mouth (a person she later says she loves), Charlotte Swenson breaking into Ellen's house and wandering through it examing photographs and then being confronted by young Charlotte who doesn't seem the least concerned with a strange woman in her mother's bathroom, young Charlotte basically assaulting a high school boy and later a high school teacher/terrorist. Even the payoff is silly. I hung around for the car accident. I wanted to find out what happened and why but even that was disappointing, as was the recreation. I guess Charlotte Swenson was the real terrorist all along. I'm reasonably sure the book had something to say about modern culture but I couldn't find it in the tornado of tortured prose.
aborted-efforts
December 12, 2012I didn't want to like Jennifer Egan; I wanted to love her. I wanted her to be my new favorite writer, but due to some profound personal failing, I can't stand her books, which does pose something of a challenge there. I really don't know what's wrong with me and why I can't love this book like everyone else (i.e., Mike Reynolds); it has something to do with feeling really unimpressed by her prose, and by this feeling that nothing about her writing ever surprises me. I remember this from when I tried to read A Visit from the Goon Squad; there's something dampeningly familiar and unthrilling about it for me, like making out with an old friend.
Obviously this must be my problem and not Jennifer Egan's, since all good people of quality and taste (i.e. Mike Reynolds) agree that she is the greatest. I could keep reading this -- it's not hurting me -- but I'm about to go out of town and it's due back to the library. Also, why read something I don't enjoy, especially when not enjoying it makes me feel terrible about myself?
Obviously this must be my problem and not Jennifer Egan's, since all good people of quality and taste (i.e. Mike Reynolds) agree that she is the greatest. I could keep reading this -- it's not hurting me -- but I'm about to go out of town and it's due back to the library. Also, why read something I don't enjoy, especially when not enjoying it makes me feel terrible about myself?
April 23, 2018
"After the accident, I became less visible. I don't mean in the obvious sense that I went to fewer parties and retreated from general view. Or not just that. I mean that after the accident, I became more difficult to see."
Where to begin. I read Egan's Pulitzer Prize winning book and was not impressed at all. Having decided to give her a second chance, I could not be more satisfied with my decision. This book is all about identity. But that statement seems quite over-simplified, given the number of approaches she took in exploring this concept, this idea, this theory. If I were a psychology professor instructing a class on identity, this would- unavoidably- be on the syllabus.
There are a few different storylines that Egan took in this novel, running parallel at times. Interwoven and converging, coming together for an almost artistically beautiful ending. The first tells the story of our main protagonist, Charlotte Swenson. Having survived a near deadly car crash, the start of the novel finds her in recovery from a face reconstructive surgery. This takes on special meaning when we find out that she is a model with relative success living in New York, having returned to her small hometown in Illinois in the interim. Having all her childhood longed to escape, nothing had changed. She cannot wait to return to New York to her modeling career, which, when she is honest with herself, has already been over for some time. Her new face actually provides her with the possibility of reviving this career, as nobody really recognizes her. Amusingly, Charlotte is convinced she can see others' "shadow selves"; the true then. She is, of course, wrong much of the time. The way Egan writes somehow creates this aura of a fractured identity as we read about this stereotypical model, as she falls into alcoholism to support her loss of career. There are confusing dips into unreality, sttaddling multiple identities, but in an invigorating, stimulating way.
As a child, Charlotte had a best friend named Ellen. During her visits home, she happens to run into Ellen's daughter, who (interestingly) she named Charlotte. This is our parallel story. Both Charlotte's stories involve self-esteem, identity, and growing up; discovering who they are who they possibly want to be. For young Charlotte, this is the first time. For older Charlotte, a second chance. Both women are aided by characters with their own set of complex stories. Both women have an atypical love interest that challenges their psychological situations. And when all their stories converge, it is a removal of masks at the conclusion of a masquerade party.
What makes this novel especially poetic and effecting is the way in which each of the characters are aware- to varying degrees, and dependent on their varying degrees of denial- of how fake their worlds are, how malleable their identities, how futile their efforts. Painfully so. Charlotte, in her quest to love who she is, rediscover herself beneath the artificiality. Irene, in her struggle to be genuine a world that insists otherwise. Anthony, in his endeavor to escape- emotionally, mentally, physically, metaphysically. Moose, in his desperation to unburden himself of his knowledge, having at least found someone he believes worthy of it- yet always hyper aware of his minute importance in the scheme of the universe. Young Charlotte, in her aloneness as she tries to find her way in the world. Aziz/Z/Michael West as a secretive teacher that despairingly finds out that he does not have what it takes to be who he thought he wanted to be.
Read it. You will not regret it.
**** Spoilers ****
I love the diversity of characters here.
Charlotte Swenson's career is, indeed, revived, but by means far different than expected. She walks away from her last chance at repositioning herself with a modeling career in a mesmerizing scene with a new name in New York: Spiro. Very avant-garde, his "thing" is cutting his models with razors to produce real blood. It supposedly heals soon enough and is therefore worth it to be featured in such authentic, intense, photographs in Italian Vogue. When she finds out, her suggestion to use fake blood is seen as blasphemy. ‘Fake is fake,’ Spiro said dismissively. ‘I’m trying to get at some kind of truth, here, in this phony, sick, ludicrous world. Something pure. Releasing blood is a sacrifice. It’s the most real thing there is.'”
She becomes depressed and turns to alcohol. Even about this, Egan writes with such efficacy.
"After eight years in the same one bedroom apartment, I was suddenly finding it crowded beyond capacity. There was me. That was my unrecognizable face. And there was someone else. It was Despair.
Unlike the numerous other visitors I had entertained over the years, Despair lacked an outline, or, for that matter, any distinct shape. I couldn't even see it. But when I unlocked my door after returning and stepped inside my apartment, I felt it pull the life out of me...
I waited for Despair to leave. But it didn't leave. It leaned against me, pushing at me from above and below with a drawling, mountainous weight. 'When did you arrive?' I asked it. 'To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure? How long do you intend to stay?'
But Despair did not have to answer to anyone.
When the phone rang, my new companion leaned on the receiver so that I could hardly lift it from its cradle... "
Charlotte, instead, finds herself selling her story to a new venture called "Ordinary People™". As one of the inaugural members, she is "Extraordinary" (along with a homeless guy, native tribesman, etcetera). They leave cameras in their residences, write daily diary entries for the world to read. (As a side note, Egan eerily predicted our recent era of love for reality television. When this was first written, The Real World was only mildly popular. The website "Ordinary People™" is portrayed as a satire, as a ridiculous idea which would be beyond hilarious to succeed. The laugh is on us. It did come true, only a few years later.) A look, of course, at how our culture exploits th these individuals gladly seeing invasion of privacy as fame and fortune, publicity and status.
We also have Moose, Ellen's older brother and young Charlotte's uncle. Following an epiphany of sorts on the side of the highway (He sees the end of the universe? The beginning?), he changes from a popular high school football player to a professor obsessed with his hometown Rockford, Illinois's industrial past. With young Charlotte studying under him, this is some interesting historical information the reader is given the chance to learn. Who he is after this change, how his neighbors perceive him, are all aspects examined. The transformation of Rockford from an important industrial city to another Midwest town reflects the modernization of our world and parallels the emotional progress of our characters.
We have Anthony Halliday, a detective looking for "Z". Charlotte falls in love with him, they support each other, both being recovering alcoholics. Sorta an elusive, mysterious character. Serves as Charlotte's love interest, but, as noted, she is not really in the place have a real relationship.
Irene Maitlock is a college professor that is shocked by her ability to deceive others. Feeling forced to become Charlotte's ghost writer (her Maestro husband has fallen on hard times), she is another character that adds intrigue. She remains by Charlotte's side until the well-orchestrated finale. They become closer, but never actually close. It seems to me that Charlotte has a built in wall with her new identity that would never allow her to be real.
Young Charlotte is not a very pretty girl She not only knows this, but defines herself by it. She is shunned by many of her friends because of her ambivalence and shyness. She closes herself off from them, is not sure what she wants sexually, ignores then to work with her tropical fish and meet with her Uncle Moose. When she does decide, it is to pursue a relationship with her mysterious arithmetics teacher, Michael West. An older man, clearly has secrets, she makes adamant decision to have sex with him, feels like she falls in love with him, practically throws herself at him, always being the one to initiate their encounters, riding over to his place in the middle of the night- that is how she's meet him for the first time, and how she met him the last time, before he disappeared into thin air.
That would be because he is a terrorist. A trained terrorist, he actually was once older Charlotte Swenson's lover, known to her as "Z". He is another great character. He nurtures his anger, trying to build himself up, reading himself to blow up this country. And then he finds out he does not have it in him:
"There was that terror, raw, wild. A panic whose shadow he had sensed flickering near him these past months was on him, now, at last. He began to run across the field... They had won, stamped out his anger and filled his head with this poison. They had erased his real thoughts and replace them with a plan to go to Los Angeles and make films- change plots for plots! Spread the word even further... They had won! Running, he tripped, fell sprawling among short green stalks and lay there whole minutes, heart to the soil. Then he turned his head to look at the moon, cooler now, white, the precious moon. 'Listen to it,' he whispered. 'They are controlling my thoughts!' But in English, always in English. He thought in English, dreams in English. The other languages were gone, his past was gone, and so was his rage, it had vanished with the conspiracy. Because there was no conspiracy - no them in this nation of believers. Only us...
He climbed back over the fence... In the distance he made out his car, parked where he had left it...
He wasn't lost. He was home."
Where to begin. I read Egan's Pulitzer Prize winning book and was not impressed at all. Having decided to give her a second chance, I could not be more satisfied with my decision. This book is all about identity. But that statement seems quite over-simplified, given the number of approaches she took in exploring this concept, this idea, this theory. If I were a psychology professor instructing a class on identity, this would- unavoidably- be on the syllabus.
There are a few different storylines that Egan took in this novel, running parallel at times. Interwoven and converging, coming together for an almost artistically beautiful ending. The first tells the story of our main protagonist, Charlotte Swenson. Having survived a near deadly car crash, the start of the novel finds her in recovery from a face reconstructive surgery. This takes on special meaning when we find out that she is a model with relative success living in New York, having returned to her small hometown in Illinois in the interim. Having all her childhood longed to escape, nothing had changed. She cannot wait to return to New York to her modeling career, which, when she is honest with herself, has already been over for some time. Her new face actually provides her with the possibility of reviving this career, as nobody really recognizes her. Amusingly, Charlotte is convinced she can see others' "shadow selves"; the true then. She is, of course, wrong much of the time. The way Egan writes somehow creates this aura of a fractured identity as we read about this stereotypical model, as she falls into alcoholism to support her loss of career. There are confusing dips into unreality, sttaddling multiple identities, but in an invigorating, stimulating way.
As a child, Charlotte had a best friend named Ellen. During her visits home, she happens to run into Ellen's daughter, who (interestingly) she named Charlotte. This is our parallel story. Both Charlotte's stories involve self-esteem, identity, and growing up; discovering who they are who they possibly want to be. For young Charlotte, this is the first time. For older Charlotte, a second chance. Both women are aided by characters with their own set of complex stories. Both women have an atypical love interest that challenges their psychological situations. And when all their stories converge, it is a removal of masks at the conclusion of a masquerade party.
What makes this novel especially poetic and effecting is the way in which each of the characters are aware- to varying degrees, and dependent on their varying degrees of denial- of how fake their worlds are, how malleable their identities, how futile their efforts. Painfully so. Charlotte, in her quest to love who she is, rediscover herself beneath the artificiality. Irene, in her struggle to be genuine a world that insists otherwise. Anthony, in his endeavor to escape- emotionally, mentally, physically, metaphysically. Moose, in his desperation to unburden himself of his knowledge, having at least found someone he believes worthy of it- yet always hyper aware of his minute importance in the scheme of the universe. Young Charlotte, in her aloneness as she tries to find her way in the world. Aziz/Z/Michael West as a secretive teacher that despairingly finds out that he does not have what it takes to be who he thought he wanted to be.
Read it. You will not regret it.
**** Spoilers ****
I love the diversity of characters here.
Charlotte Swenson's career is, indeed, revived, but by means far different than expected. She walks away from her last chance at repositioning herself with a modeling career in a mesmerizing scene with a new name in New York: Spiro. Very avant-garde, his "thing" is cutting his models with razors to produce real blood. It supposedly heals soon enough and is therefore worth it to be featured in such authentic, intense, photographs in Italian Vogue. When she finds out, her suggestion to use fake blood is seen as blasphemy. ‘Fake is fake,’ Spiro said dismissively. ‘I’m trying to get at some kind of truth, here, in this phony, sick, ludicrous world. Something pure. Releasing blood is a sacrifice. It’s the most real thing there is.'”
She becomes depressed and turns to alcohol. Even about this, Egan writes with such efficacy.
"After eight years in the same one bedroom apartment, I was suddenly finding it crowded beyond capacity. There was me. That was my unrecognizable face. And there was someone else. It was Despair.
Unlike the numerous other visitors I had entertained over the years, Despair lacked an outline, or, for that matter, any distinct shape. I couldn't even see it. But when I unlocked my door after returning and stepped inside my apartment, I felt it pull the life out of me...
I waited for Despair to leave. But it didn't leave. It leaned against me, pushing at me from above and below with a drawling, mountainous weight. 'When did you arrive?' I asked it. 'To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure? How long do you intend to stay?'
But Despair did not have to answer to anyone.
When the phone rang, my new companion leaned on the receiver so that I could hardly lift it from its cradle... "
Charlotte, instead, finds herself selling her story to a new venture called "Ordinary People™". As one of the inaugural members, she is "Extraordinary" (along with a homeless guy, native tribesman, etcetera). They leave cameras in their residences, write daily diary entries for the world to read. (As a side note, Egan eerily predicted our recent era of love for reality television. When this was first written, The Real World was only mildly popular. The website "Ordinary People™" is portrayed as a satire, as a ridiculous idea which would be beyond hilarious to succeed. The laugh is on us. It did come true, only a few years later.) A look, of course, at how our culture exploits th these individuals gladly seeing invasion of privacy as fame and fortune, publicity and status.
We also have Moose, Ellen's older brother and young Charlotte's uncle. Following an epiphany of sorts on the side of the highway (He sees the end of the universe? The beginning?), he changes from a popular high school football player to a professor obsessed with his hometown Rockford, Illinois's industrial past. With young Charlotte studying under him, this is some interesting historical information the reader is given the chance to learn. Who he is after this change, how his neighbors perceive him, are all aspects examined. The transformation of Rockford from an important industrial city to another Midwest town reflects the modernization of our world and parallels the emotional progress of our characters.
We have Anthony Halliday, a detective looking for "Z". Charlotte falls in love with him, they support each other, both being recovering alcoholics. Sorta an elusive, mysterious character. Serves as Charlotte's love interest, but, as noted, she is not really in the place have a real relationship.
Irene Maitlock is a college professor that is shocked by her ability to deceive others. Feeling forced to become Charlotte's ghost writer (her Maestro husband has fallen on hard times), she is another character that adds intrigue. She remains by Charlotte's side until the well-orchestrated finale. They become closer, but never actually close. It seems to me that Charlotte has a built in wall with her new identity that would never allow her to be real.
Young Charlotte is not a very pretty girl She not only knows this, but defines herself by it. She is shunned by many of her friends because of her ambivalence and shyness. She closes herself off from them, is not sure what she wants sexually, ignores then to work with her tropical fish and meet with her Uncle Moose. When she does decide, it is to pursue a relationship with her mysterious arithmetics teacher, Michael West. An older man, clearly has secrets, she makes adamant decision to have sex with him, feels like she falls in love with him, practically throws herself at him, always being the one to initiate their encounters, riding over to his place in the middle of the night- that is how she's meet him for the first time, and how she met him the last time, before he disappeared into thin air.
That would be because he is a terrorist. A trained terrorist, he actually was once older Charlotte Swenson's lover, known to her as "Z". He is another great character. He nurtures his anger, trying to build himself up, reading himself to blow up this country. And then he finds out he does not have it in him:
"There was that terror, raw, wild. A panic whose shadow he had sensed flickering near him these past months was on him, now, at last. He began to run across the field... They had won, stamped out his anger and filled his head with this poison. They had erased his real thoughts and replace them with a plan to go to Los Angeles and make films- change plots for plots! Spread the word even further... They had won! Running, he tripped, fell sprawling among short green stalks and lay there whole minutes, heart to the soil. Then he turned his head to look at the moon, cooler now, white, the precious moon. 'Listen to it,' he whispered. 'They are controlling my thoughts!' But in English, always in English. He thought in English, dreams in English. The other languages were gone, his past was gone, and so was his rage, it had vanished with the conspiracy. Because there was no conspiracy - no them in this nation of believers. Only us...
He climbed back over the fence... In the distance he made out his car, parked where he had left it...
He wasn't lost. He was home."
March 29, 2015
There was a weird period of time in college where I decided self-disclosure was the way to go. I was heavily into angst at the time, mainlining The Smiths and Oscar Wilde and caught up in the notion that because I saw myself as different from my peers this was somehow worth advertising. Talking loudly and at length about feeling melancholy and unloved was a way for me to wreathe myself in superiority, to assert that even though I was a student at a largely white, fairly affluent Midwestern college, I was different from my peers. Better.
What a self-involved little twerp I was.
My thinking – or whatever passed for it as a 20-year-old dude – was that by revealing anything that I thought was worth knowing about myself (a fairly specious line of reasoning all by itself) I’d be projecting my true self, which would be irresistible to all the 20-year-old ladies who adored Michael Stipe and really appreciated honesty. I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but it was probably my version of Campbell Scott’s character in Singles, who hits on Kyra Sedgwick’s character by claiming he doesn’t have an act, and what she sees is what she gets. Her response, though, is the only truthful line in the scene: “I think that a) you have an act, and b) not having an act is your act.”
“Honesty” was my act, and I put it in quotes here purposefully. My honesty wasn’t any more honest than anyone else’s. I was supposed to be soulful because I could recite Morrissey lyrics and deep because I openly admitted to reservoirs of self-loathing, as though that made me dashing instead of pathetic. But it was an affectation, a way of drawing attention to myself. I mean, not totally. I’ve wrestled with issues of anxiety and depression since at least junior high, but adopting “woe is me” as a lifestyle choice was just another way of wearing a Joy Division t-shirt without having to do the laundry.
I couldn’t help but think of all this as I read Look at Me, Jennifer Egan’s powerhouse of a novel about several characters all wrestling with conceptions of identity, how much to reveal, and how to be appreciated for who they (think they) really are. It’s a dense, multi-layered text that reads as breezily as a beach mystery and a book that manages to say Real Things about 21st Century life without preaching. It initially seems to be centered on one character, Charlotte, a past-her-prime fashion model who suffers through a horrific car accident that destroys her face and then multiple reconstructive surgeries to rebuild it. She comes out the other side not looking like her old self – people she knows look right past her in restaurants and need to be re-introduced to her at parties – and while the book started promisingly, I wasn’t sure Egan could sustain my interest in Charlotte for 500+ pages.
But then Egan begins to weave in threads from other characters, deftly connecting them in ways that were both unexpected and inevitable (but no less satisfying for it). In addition to Charlotte the Model (CTM), Egan takes up the question of personal identity in a variety of ways and with a range of characters (in both New York City, where CTM currently lives, and Rockford, IL, where she was born and raised) that never seems forced:
• Charlotte – This second Charlotte is the 16-year-old daughter of CTM’s childhood best friend. Bookish and shy, she falls in love with a much older man as a reaction to her superficial friends and as a way of feeling important to someone worldly.
• Moose – The uncle of Charlotte II, Moose is a disgraced Yale professor now teaching (and seeking redemption) at a college in Rockford. He begins holding private lessons with Charlotte II to help her see the world the way he sees it.
• Michael West – A high school math teacher with a secret. To say more – other than the fact that it deals with the core of what it means to be American – would be to spoil one of the book’s great pleasures.
• Anthony Halliday – An alcoholic private detective who begins a dalliance with CTM in the course of investigating the disappearance of Z., one of CTM’s New York friends.
All five of these characters present a different way of unpacking the book’s title, and Egan probably could have given us a satisfying book just based on their lives. But she introduces more characters halfway through the novel and very nearly flirts with obsolescence in the process when she brings Thomas and his plan for a website that documents the lives of Real People™ into the mix.
(Details of the site, for those who are interested: As Thomas describes it, it’ll launch with a handful of Ordinary People – the normal folks, like us – and a handful of Extraordinary People –models, actors, captains of industry – at its core. They’ll provide text-based journal entries where they relate the details of their day, but then eventually photos, music, streaming video, and filmed reenactments of key events from the person’s life will be incorporated into each individual page. The idea is to gradually expand the database and in the process bring the world closer together. From the site we learn about and develop empathy for the people whose lives we can now access 24 hours a day, and by extension we develop the same empathy for people like them we meet on a daily basis. It’s social media as altruism, before social media as we know it existed.)
Keep in mind that Look at Me was written in 1999 (and published in 2001), pre-MySpace, pre-Facebook, pre-everything else we now know about the pervasiveness of social media. There’s the risk that Thomas’ site and his proposal to make CTM a cornerstone of this new venture will look quaint and archaic in our current culture. But somehow it doesn’t, which speaks to just how prescient Egan was, both in devising the concept for the site and for anticipating the still-thorny question of just how much we present of ourselves online is authentic and how much is fabricated for effect. Much of the second half of the book is focused on that question as Egan peels back the layers of each of the main characters, gradually revealing whatever lies at the core.
As always, when I dwell too much on the details of plot I feel like I fail to sell the book’s quality. Put simply, Look at Me is a rich, resonant book, especially for anyone who’s wrestled with the question of who they really are and how they reconcile present with past – which, I imagine, is most of us. In the context of how I began this review – considering identity and how we choose to present it to the world – it perhaps makes the most sense to close with the passage that hit closest to home and which speaks most profoundly to how I think of myself now in relation to the person I was. I might not be the 20-year-old drip I used to be, but when I think in terms of what people expected of me when I was younger, I feel like I’ve got a long way to go. And the clock is ticking.
"When Moose imagined himself as a child, he pictured a boy watching him across a doorway, through a screen, and a bubble of sorrow would break in his chest, as if he were seeing someone who had died or vanished inexplicably, a milk carton child, as if some vital connection between himself and that boy had been lost. And despite all that Moose knew he was achieving now or trying to achieve, still he felt – inexplicably – that he had failed to fulfill the promise of that little boy, and was being visited by his unhappy ghost."
Read all my reviews at goldstarforrobotboy.net
What a self-involved little twerp I was.
My thinking – or whatever passed for it as a 20-year-old dude – was that by revealing anything that I thought was worth knowing about myself (a fairly specious line of reasoning all by itself) I’d be projecting my true self, which would be irresistible to all the 20-year-old ladies who adored Michael Stipe and really appreciated honesty. I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but it was probably my version of Campbell Scott’s character in Singles, who hits on Kyra Sedgwick’s character by claiming he doesn’t have an act, and what she sees is what she gets. Her response, though, is the only truthful line in the scene: “I think that a) you have an act, and b) not having an act is your act.”
“Honesty” was my act, and I put it in quotes here purposefully. My honesty wasn’t any more honest than anyone else’s. I was supposed to be soulful because I could recite Morrissey lyrics and deep because I openly admitted to reservoirs of self-loathing, as though that made me dashing instead of pathetic. But it was an affectation, a way of drawing attention to myself. I mean, not totally. I’ve wrestled with issues of anxiety and depression since at least junior high, but adopting “woe is me” as a lifestyle choice was just another way of wearing a Joy Division t-shirt without having to do the laundry.
I couldn’t help but think of all this as I read Look at Me, Jennifer Egan’s powerhouse of a novel about several characters all wrestling with conceptions of identity, how much to reveal, and how to be appreciated for who they (think they) really are. It’s a dense, multi-layered text that reads as breezily as a beach mystery and a book that manages to say Real Things about 21st Century life without preaching. It initially seems to be centered on one character, Charlotte, a past-her-prime fashion model who suffers through a horrific car accident that destroys her face and then multiple reconstructive surgeries to rebuild it. She comes out the other side not looking like her old self – people she knows look right past her in restaurants and need to be re-introduced to her at parties – and while the book started promisingly, I wasn’t sure Egan could sustain my interest in Charlotte for 500+ pages.
But then Egan begins to weave in threads from other characters, deftly connecting them in ways that were both unexpected and inevitable (but no less satisfying for it). In addition to Charlotte the Model (CTM), Egan takes up the question of personal identity in a variety of ways and with a range of characters (in both New York City, where CTM currently lives, and Rockford, IL, where she was born and raised) that never seems forced:
• Charlotte – This second Charlotte is the 16-year-old daughter of CTM’s childhood best friend. Bookish and shy, she falls in love with a much older man as a reaction to her superficial friends and as a way of feeling important to someone worldly.
• Moose – The uncle of Charlotte II, Moose is a disgraced Yale professor now teaching (and seeking redemption) at a college in Rockford. He begins holding private lessons with Charlotte II to help her see the world the way he sees it.
• Michael West – A high school math teacher with a secret. To say more – other than the fact that it deals with the core of what it means to be American – would be to spoil one of the book’s great pleasures.
• Anthony Halliday – An alcoholic private detective who begins a dalliance with CTM in the course of investigating the disappearance of Z., one of CTM’s New York friends.
All five of these characters present a different way of unpacking the book’s title, and Egan probably could have given us a satisfying book just based on their lives. But she introduces more characters halfway through the novel and very nearly flirts with obsolescence in the process when she brings Thomas and his plan for a website that documents the lives of Real People™ into the mix.
(Details of the site, for those who are interested: As Thomas describes it, it’ll launch with a handful of Ordinary People – the normal folks, like us – and a handful of Extraordinary People –models, actors, captains of industry – at its core. They’ll provide text-based journal entries where they relate the details of their day, but then eventually photos, music, streaming video, and filmed reenactments of key events from the person’s life will be incorporated into each individual page. The idea is to gradually expand the database and in the process bring the world closer together. From the site we learn about and develop empathy for the people whose lives we can now access 24 hours a day, and by extension we develop the same empathy for people like them we meet on a daily basis. It’s social media as altruism, before social media as we know it existed.)
Keep in mind that Look at Me was written in 1999 (and published in 2001), pre-MySpace, pre-Facebook, pre-everything else we now know about the pervasiveness of social media. There’s the risk that Thomas’ site and his proposal to make CTM a cornerstone of this new venture will look quaint and archaic in our current culture. But somehow it doesn’t, which speaks to just how prescient Egan was, both in devising the concept for the site and for anticipating the still-thorny question of just how much we present of ourselves online is authentic and how much is fabricated for effect. Much of the second half of the book is focused on that question as Egan peels back the layers of each of the main characters, gradually revealing whatever lies at the core.
As always, when I dwell too much on the details of plot I feel like I fail to sell the book’s quality. Put simply, Look at Me is a rich, resonant book, especially for anyone who’s wrestled with the question of who they really are and how they reconcile present with past – which, I imagine, is most of us. In the context of how I began this review – considering identity and how we choose to present it to the world – it perhaps makes the most sense to close with the passage that hit closest to home and which speaks most profoundly to how I think of myself now in relation to the person I was. I might not be the 20-year-old drip I used to be, but when I think in terms of what people expected of me when I was younger, I feel like I’ve got a long way to go. And the clock is ticking.
"When Moose imagined himself as a child, he pictured a boy watching him across a doorway, through a screen, and a bubble of sorrow would break in his chest, as if he were seeing someone who had died or vanished inexplicably, a milk carton child, as if some vital connection between himself and that boy had been lost. And despite all that Moose knew he was achieving now or trying to achieve, still he felt – inexplicably – that he had failed to fulfill the promise of that little boy, and was being visited by his unhappy ghost."
Read all my reviews at goldstarforrobotboy.net
June 15, 2010
When I was first introduced to this amazing novel I was in no position to appreciate it. This was some four or five years ago, when, as a sophomore English major, I took a well-intentioned but somewhat premature course on 9/11 and the novel. I say premature because the number of novels that dealt directly with the attacks was pretty small at the time, and was further limited by the whims of the professor, who elected to eschew at least two of the more well-known eligible titles; the Foer and McEwan books were both out, by that point, but both were curiously absent from the syllabus. A majority of said syllabus, then, was filled up with pre-9/11 works presciently engaged with post-9/11 themes (at least in theory), of which Jennifer Egan's Look at Me was one. (Another was DeLillo's Mao II, my first handshake with that brilliant man who would go on to blow my mind many times over; presumably, if this course were taught now, it'd be his Falling Man on the docket instead—assuming that post is preferable to pre.)
I hadn't heard of Egan's book, but then I hadn't heard of much. In my student years (that is to say, my entire life up until roughly Thanksgiving 2008, when I finished the last of my college coursework), reading-for-pleasure was, if not quite a foreign concept, then a luxury I most often felt I couldn't afford, either out of fealty to more pressing scholastic duties, or simply out of cussed laziness. Oh, I'd been a precocious and prolific reader throughout childhood, inhaling many books whose content I was too young to comprehend (why a third-grader would feel any compulsion to pick up Michael Crichton's Sphere is a mystery I cannot solve, despite having been that third-grader; the movie wasn't even out yet!), but once puberty hit, books in my life became largely relegated to the realm of school, of assigned reading, of forced contemplation and fun-draining work. I got into comics, and then I got into movies, and music, and in high school I started doing theater—between all of that stuff and homework and, of course, the prodigious masturbation, where was the time for books? (I did make time for Kurt Vonnegut, natch, with whom I underwent the requisite life-changing experience as a teen.)
All of which is to say that my pursuit of contemporary and classic literature as a recreational activity is a relatively recent development, and that, in late '05 or early '06 (can't remember which semester it was), I had embarrassingly little patience or focus or determination w/r/t books, even the ones I needed to read as part of my expensive college education. And so what I'm trying to say is this: I abandoned Egan's Look at Me after something like 100 pages, took the same half-assed slacker approach with it that I took with most every other academically feted work of literature I encountered. Basically, I didn't give a shit. To be fair, this was a period when I was feeling pretty depressed and lost for reasons that had nothing to do with books, and schoolwork was more of an added stressor than an intellectual outlet. I was never a great student, though. And now I look back and want to throttle that past self, tell him what a great fucking book has just been put into his hands, and that he has the special opportunity to discuss that book in the rarefied environment of the academy, with a prof who was a pretty awesome authority on the subject, and other bright students with diverse perspectives, etc etc. Especially since there's some stuff near the end of the book that I'm just plain confused about in terms of what actually happened. No going back, of course, but fortunately for me, books are non-perishables, and Look at Me has been sitting there waiting for me to, well, look at it, this whole time. Which I recently did, due in no small part to the enthusiasm of certain Goodreads users.
Now that I've bored you with all that personal stuff, I suppose it's time to bore you with some thoughts on the actual book. First of all: I was consistently impressed by Egan's prose, which reminded me of Philip Roth's; both writers effect an eerily perfect alchemy of effortless readability, complex syntax, and laser precision. It's not flashy writing, but it's the kind of high seamlessness that can only arise from a deep, deliberate sense of composition and form. Writers at both extremes of the prose spectrum—Dick-and-Jane declarers and mad, word-drunk stylists—could stand to learn a thing or twelve from Egan's carefully measured feats of textual tightrope-walking.
Content-wise, I can see why the book failed to capture the imagination of 19-year-old me. I think my impression of it back then was, if not quite chick-littish (I wasn't that clueless), then intended for an audience whose demographics skewed more towards, um, chicks. See, the early sections of the book contain a lot of material about a) blossoming female sexuality, and b) life as a glamorous New York fashion model. So I think my reaction at the time was, "this book isn't for me." Of course, I had no idea how expansive the novel would turn out to be, how it would grow into this glorious polycephalic beast, rendering those early qualms totally irrelevant.
I don't really want to delve into any major analysis of the story and themes because—where do you start? Much has been made of the book's prescience, and yep, that's there; particularly impressive is one thread in which Egan predicts both reality TV and social-networking websites in one fell swoop. But more generally I think Egan captures the anxiety and unease of a time we now see as the calm before the storm, that Clinton-era window after the advent of the personal computer and the web but before 9/11 and Bush's gravy train to hell. Oh sure it seems like a more innocent time, what with the biggest national concern being the blowjobs received by the president, but there's always an eeriness in the calm before the storm, and it seems Egan was feeling that eeriness acutely. She felt that America was on the cusp of something apocalyptically weird and awful, and she spliced her fears into the persons of a raving history-teacher-cum-prophet (who laments the passing of "the days when rocks and trees and statues had spoken with the voices of gods," replaced by images and digital recreations and representations and simulacra), and a victim of the same image-ascendant apocalypse. The mordant joke of the epilogue is both funny and weirdly, subtly terrifying. I'm not sure that the narrative's various strands come together in way that satisfies my basic reader's drive to make sense of all the data before me (I think Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply, a novel which could easily have been profoundly influenced by this one, offers a more conventionally satisfying wrap-up of a structurally and thematically similar text), but I'm left with that not-unpleasant confusion that often remains in the wake of great art, when we know we haven't yet caught up to the artist's vision, but that said vision exists authoritatively.
And what I'm left with, more broadly, is a sense that this is a superlative example of what the contemporary novel can be. No hipster posturing or ostentatious trickery; no schmaltzy string-tugging; no hooky sensationalism; no bullshit, in other words—just a probing inquiry into believable characters, an intricately wrought narrative full of surprises and profundities, and a pitilessly perceptive reflection of its times. It's not a movie, or a TV series, or any other (perfectly valid) form of narrative art; it's a freakin' novel, a freakin' American novel...you feel me? Not bad for a book I once casually abandoned out of slacker indifference, eh? I do regret missing out on those classroom discussions (whether I was absent from class physically or just mentally is irrelevant), but that's not even as bad as the time I missed out on Robert Stone visiting a different class of mine for a special Q&A about Dog Soldiers, which, guess what, I didn't finish either. So if I'm redressing the literary indiscretions of my past, you're next, Dog Soldiers. Better watch out, or I'll write another 1400-word essay about you.
P.S. I have no idea why the back-cover synopsis of Look at Me namedrops David Lynch. That is pretty misleading.
I hadn't heard of Egan's book, but then I hadn't heard of much. In my student years (that is to say, my entire life up until roughly Thanksgiving 2008, when I finished the last of my college coursework), reading-for-pleasure was, if not quite a foreign concept, then a luxury I most often felt I couldn't afford, either out of fealty to more pressing scholastic duties, or simply out of cussed laziness. Oh, I'd been a precocious and prolific reader throughout childhood, inhaling many books whose content I was too young to comprehend (why a third-grader would feel any compulsion to pick up Michael Crichton's Sphere is a mystery I cannot solve, despite having been that third-grader; the movie wasn't even out yet!), but once puberty hit, books in my life became largely relegated to the realm of school, of assigned reading, of forced contemplation and fun-draining work. I got into comics, and then I got into movies, and music, and in high school I started doing theater—between all of that stuff and homework and, of course, the prodigious masturbation, where was the time for books? (I did make time for Kurt Vonnegut, natch, with whom I underwent the requisite life-changing experience as a teen.)
All of which is to say that my pursuit of contemporary and classic literature as a recreational activity is a relatively recent development, and that, in late '05 or early '06 (can't remember which semester it was), I had embarrassingly little patience or focus or determination w/r/t books, even the ones I needed to read as part of my expensive college education. And so what I'm trying to say is this: I abandoned Egan's Look at Me after something like 100 pages, took the same half-assed slacker approach with it that I took with most every other academically feted work of literature I encountered. Basically, I didn't give a shit. To be fair, this was a period when I was feeling pretty depressed and lost for reasons that had nothing to do with books, and schoolwork was more of an added stressor than an intellectual outlet. I was never a great student, though. And now I look back and want to throttle that past self, tell him what a great fucking book has just been put into his hands, and that he has the special opportunity to discuss that book in the rarefied environment of the academy, with a prof who was a pretty awesome authority on the subject, and other bright students with diverse perspectives, etc etc. Especially since there's some stuff near the end of the book that I'm just plain confused about in terms of what actually happened. No going back, of course, but fortunately for me, books are non-perishables, and Look at Me has been sitting there waiting for me to, well, look at it, this whole time. Which I recently did, due in no small part to the enthusiasm of certain Goodreads users.
Now that I've bored you with all that personal stuff, I suppose it's time to bore you with some thoughts on the actual book. First of all: I was consistently impressed by Egan's prose, which reminded me of Philip Roth's; both writers effect an eerily perfect alchemy of effortless readability, complex syntax, and laser precision. It's not flashy writing, but it's the kind of high seamlessness that can only arise from a deep, deliberate sense of composition and form. Writers at both extremes of the prose spectrum—Dick-and-Jane declarers and mad, word-drunk stylists—could stand to learn a thing or twelve from Egan's carefully measured feats of textual tightrope-walking.
Content-wise, I can see why the book failed to capture the imagination of 19-year-old me. I think my impression of it back then was, if not quite chick-littish (I wasn't that clueless), then intended for an audience whose demographics skewed more towards, um, chicks. See, the early sections of the book contain a lot of material about a) blossoming female sexuality, and b) life as a glamorous New York fashion model. So I think my reaction at the time was, "this book isn't for me." Of course, I had no idea how expansive the novel would turn out to be, how it would grow into this glorious polycephalic beast, rendering those early qualms totally irrelevant.
I don't really want to delve into any major analysis of the story and themes because—where do you start? Much has been made of the book's prescience, and yep, that's there; particularly impressive is one thread in which Egan predicts both reality TV and social-networking websites in one fell swoop. But more generally I think Egan captures the anxiety and unease of a time we now see as the calm before the storm, that Clinton-era window after the advent of the personal computer and the web but before 9/11 and Bush's gravy train to hell. Oh sure it seems like a more innocent time, what with the biggest national concern being the blowjobs received by the president, but there's always an eeriness in the calm before the storm, and it seems Egan was feeling that eeriness acutely. She felt that America was on the cusp of something apocalyptically weird and awful, and she spliced her fears into the persons of a raving history-teacher-cum-prophet (who laments the passing of "the days when rocks and trees and statues had spoken with the voices of gods," replaced by images and digital recreations and representations and simulacra), and a victim of the same image-ascendant apocalypse. The mordant joke of the epilogue is both funny and weirdly, subtly terrifying. I'm not sure that the narrative's various strands come together in way that satisfies my basic reader's drive to make sense of all the data before me (I think Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply, a novel which could easily have been profoundly influenced by this one, offers a more conventionally satisfying wrap-up of a structurally and thematically similar text), but I'm left with that not-unpleasant confusion that often remains in the wake of great art, when we know we haven't yet caught up to the artist's vision, but that said vision exists authoritatively.
And what I'm left with, more broadly, is a sense that this is a superlative example of what the contemporary novel can be. No hipster posturing or ostentatious trickery; no schmaltzy string-tugging; no hooky sensationalism; no bullshit, in other words—just a probing inquiry into believable characters, an intricately wrought narrative full of surprises and profundities, and a pitilessly perceptive reflection of its times. It's not a movie, or a TV series, or any other (perfectly valid) form of narrative art; it's a freakin' novel, a freakin' American novel...you feel me? Not bad for a book I once casually abandoned out of slacker indifference, eh? I do regret missing out on those classroom discussions (whether I was absent from class physically or just mentally is irrelevant), but that's not even as bad as the time I missed out on Robert Stone visiting a different class of mine for a special Q&A about Dog Soldiers, which, guess what, I didn't finish either. So if I'm redressing the literary indiscretions of my past, you're next, Dog Soldiers. Better watch out, or I'll write another 1400-word essay about you.
P.S. I have no idea why the back-cover synopsis of Look at Me namedrops David Lynch. That is pretty misleading.
July 11, 2017
In my summer quest to read some of the titles that have been languishing on my TBR for years, I picked up Jennifer Egan’s 2001 novel, Look at Me. Egan is an author I should love. Her books (of which I’ve read four now) contain all the elements I love to read: non-linear storytelling; complex and damaged characters; and the exploration of a big idea.
Look at Me is no exception as it explores the idea of how we see – ourselves, others, the world, truth – through the shifting perspectives of four very damaged (physically, emotionally, psychologically and even geo-politically) characters. The premise is outstanding: a model who just missed super-stardom is in a horrific accident and has her face surgically rebuilt. And, forgive the pun, but Charlotte’s problems are not just skin-deep. As her friends fail to recognize her, she has to figure out who she is. It’s really an intriguing story.
We also come to know two men and a girl, damaged and searching for identity in their own ways. Their storylines weave and bounce off of each other in unexpected ways. Egan is a smart author with keen insights into human nature, our frailties, paranoias and defense mechanisms.
All great stuff, but (and this is a big but for me), it just goes on far too long with too much repetition. All of the elements of this book, edited down by 100 pages, would have been a great read to me, but by the time I got to the last quarter of this 400-page book, I was tired of it…tired of the internal monologues careening from one person to the next, tired of Rockford, tired even of the big idea.
I think I have to face the truth that Jennifer Egan is author I admire more than I like.
Look at Me is no exception as it explores the idea of how we see – ourselves, others, the world, truth – through the shifting perspectives of four very damaged (physically, emotionally, psychologically and even geo-politically) characters. The premise is outstanding: a model who just missed super-stardom is in a horrific accident and has her face surgically rebuilt. And, forgive the pun, but Charlotte’s problems are not just skin-deep. As her friends fail to recognize her, she has to figure out who she is. It’s really an intriguing story.
“I was peeling apart in layers. I was breaking into bits. She was coming apart at the seams … my head buzzing with a confusion of junk noise, white noise, space junk, a junkyard of noisy thought that made me long instead for a lovely, petaled silence.”
We also come to know two men and a girl, damaged and searching for identity in their own ways. Their storylines weave and bounce off of each other in unexpected ways. Egan is a smart author with keen insights into human nature, our frailties, paranoias and defense mechanisms.
“We lie. That's what we do. You're selling me a line of bullshit and you want me to sell you a line of bullshit back so you can write a major line of bullshit and be paid for it.”
All great stuff, but (and this is a big but for me), it just goes on far too long with too much repetition. All of the elements of this book, edited down by 100 pages, would have been a great read to me, but by the time I got to the last quarter of this 400-page book, I was tired of it…tired of the internal monologues careening from one person to the next, tired of Rockford, tired even of the big idea.
I think I have to face the truth that Jennifer Egan is author I admire more than I like.
November 12, 2018
Video review
So prescient it's scary, it features an unforgettable cast of characters headed at breakneck speed toward certain doom. No need for that title, it's impossible to look away.
So prescient it's scary, it features an unforgettable cast of characters headed at breakneck speed toward certain doom. No need for that title, it's impossible to look away.
November 25, 2012
Ever wanted to read a philosophical novel with all the philosophy taken out? Here's your beast. I'd thought, since she's been in the news for a recent novel, that Egan was alive and well, but this novel makes it quite obvious that she died sometime around 1914, and is in fact a Victorian novelist disguised as our contemporary. Why is it obvious?
* slightly poetic but otherwise totally banal prose style.
* huge numbers of plots that never actually get joined together.
* fascination with characters, but no way of actually distinguishing them other than altering their ages and genders (i.e., they all sound exactly the same).
* at least twice as long as it should have been.
* obsession with social and intellectual issues, but in a purely personal manner that, ironically, never does much more than skim the surface of said issues.
* silly ideas about seeing people's 'true selves.'
Yes: this is a Victorian novel, written about what we think of as a uniquely twentieth century problem, the obsession with images and appearances.
More specifically, for the first 100 pages, the first-person narrative of Charlotte the model is really boring, and the third person narrative of Charlotte the young girl is great. For the next 300 pages, this is so completely inverted that I almost skipped whole chapters to get back to the actual story, as young Charlotte's plot blossomed out into a whole bunch of useless, shit flowers (her brother has cancer! her uncle is crazy! her friends are teenagers!). Yes, there's all sorts of neat, foreheadsmackingly obvious parallels between the Charlottes (they both relate to people only through sex! they both live/d in Rockford! they know some of the same people! they both alter their appearance! they're both involved with a man who might be a terrorist but actually appears to have decided to direct movies instead!), but otherwise there's no connection between them. In other words: one story, told twice. Not fun.
The breathless praise this book received suggests that people really like reading about things that are just about to happen, and that's fair. But I was deeply disappointed: this could have been a monster. As it is, it's period piece, but one that makes me think I ought to keep reading her novels, because she clearly *could* write the monster.
* slightly poetic but otherwise totally banal prose style.
* huge numbers of plots that never actually get joined together.
* fascination with characters, but no way of actually distinguishing them other than altering their ages and genders (i.e., they all sound exactly the same).
* at least twice as long as it should have been.
* obsession with social and intellectual issues, but in a purely personal manner that, ironically, never does much more than skim the surface of said issues.
* silly ideas about seeing people's 'true selves.'
Yes: this is a Victorian novel, written about what we think of as a uniquely twentieth century problem, the obsession with images and appearances.
More specifically, for the first 100 pages, the first-person narrative of Charlotte the model is really boring, and the third person narrative of Charlotte the young girl is great. For the next 300 pages, this is so completely inverted that I almost skipped whole chapters to get back to the actual story, as young Charlotte's plot blossomed out into a whole bunch of useless, shit flowers (her brother has cancer! her uncle is crazy! her friends are teenagers!). Yes, there's all sorts of neat, foreheadsmackingly obvious parallels between the Charlottes (they both relate to people only through sex! they both live/d in Rockford! they know some of the same people! they both alter their appearance! they're both involved with a man who might be a terrorist but actually appears to have decided to direct movies instead!), but otherwise there's no connection between them. In other words: one story, told twice. Not fun.
The breathless praise this book received suggests that people really like reading about things that are just about to happen, and that's fair. But I was deeply disappointed: this could have been a monster. As it is, it's period piece, but one that makes me think I ought to keep reading her novels, because she clearly *could* write the monster.
October 31, 2007
I actually have a lot of complaints - well, maybe not complaints - about Look at Me. It's a big mess of a book, but it's a smart mess. Egan is wildly imaginative and she has a lot of great ideas, but they don't cohere satisfactorily in the end.
April 3, 2016
Eine Model verliert bei einem schweren Unfall sein Gesicht und erhält durch chirurgische Eingriffe ein neues; ein mysteriöser Mann verschwindet und taucht unter anderem Namen wieder auf; ein junges Mädchen im mittleren Westen versucht erwachsen zu werden und seinen eigenen Weg zu finden; ein alkoholkranker Privatdetektiv erinnert hin und wieder an alte Hard boiled-Krimis. Diese und weitere Handlungsfäden verknüpfen sich auf spannende Art und Weise, man kann den Roman durchaus einfach als Krimi lesen.
Es geht aber um viel mehr: Es geht um Sichtbarkeit, Individualität, Bewusstsein. Eine der Figuren erforscht die Bedeutung der Entwicklung von Glas und Spiegeln für das Bewusstsein der Menschen: Beide Materialien machen Dinge sichtbar, geben Menschen eine Vorstellung von sich selbst, bringen (im Fall von Glas) Licht in den dunkelsten Winkel.
Gleichzeitig sind Menschen für andere, selbst diejenigen, die ihnen am nächsten stehen, nicht wirklich sichtbar. Am ehesten durchschaut dies das Model, das bei der Begegnung mit anderen Menschen stets nach deren „SchattenIch“ Ausschau hält.
Und nicht zuletzt geht es auch, wie am Ende von Der größere Teil der Welt, darum, was moderne Medien mit Menschen machen: Für das Model bedeutet dies, das es mit Models aus Kriegsgebieten, armen Ländern, Entstellten konkurrieren muss, weil diese angeblich echt seien. Models werden die Gesichter zerschnitten, um wahrhaftig zu wirken. Und schließlich verlieren Menschen in diesem Medienzirkus jegliche Privatheit, ihre Leben dienen der Unterhaltung und werden gefakt, weil nur eine manipulierte Wirklichkeit noch als echt wahrgenommen wird. Egan hat eine tolle Dystopie geschrieben, darüber wie wir, wenn wir beginnen unser Leben medial zu vermarkten, uns mit den Augen anderer beginnen zu sehen und für deren Augen inszenieren.
Es gibt zudem verwandte Charaktere, über die sich lange nachdenken lässt: Der Wissenschaftler Moose und der potenzielle Terrorist Michael West, beide Außenseiter, die hellsichtig ihre Umwelt sehen, mit ihrer Aggressivität und Wut kämpfen, mit dem Feuer spielen. Dagegen die beiden Charlottes, die eine schön, die andere unscheinbar. Auch hier wird der Unterschied zwischen Sichtbarkeit und Unsichtbarkeit thematisiert.
Es geht aber um viel mehr: Es geht um Sichtbarkeit, Individualität, Bewusstsein. Eine der Figuren erforscht die Bedeutung der Entwicklung von Glas und Spiegeln für das Bewusstsein der Menschen: Beide Materialien machen Dinge sichtbar, geben Menschen eine Vorstellung von sich selbst, bringen (im Fall von Glas) Licht in den dunkelsten Winkel.
Gleichzeitig sind Menschen für andere, selbst diejenigen, die ihnen am nächsten stehen, nicht wirklich sichtbar. Am ehesten durchschaut dies das Model, das bei der Begegnung mit anderen Menschen stets nach deren „SchattenIch“ Ausschau hält.
Und nicht zuletzt geht es auch, wie am Ende von Der größere Teil der Welt, darum, was moderne Medien mit Menschen machen: Für das Model bedeutet dies, das es mit Models aus Kriegsgebieten, armen Ländern, Entstellten konkurrieren muss, weil diese angeblich echt seien. Models werden die Gesichter zerschnitten, um wahrhaftig zu wirken. Und schließlich verlieren Menschen in diesem Medienzirkus jegliche Privatheit, ihre Leben dienen der Unterhaltung und werden gefakt, weil nur eine manipulierte Wirklichkeit noch als echt wahrgenommen wird. Egan hat eine tolle Dystopie geschrieben, darüber wie wir, wenn wir beginnen unser Leben medial zu vermarkten, uns mit den Augen anderer beginnen zu sehen und für deren Augen inszenieren.
Es gibt zudem verwandte Charaktere, über die sich lange nachdenken lässt: Der Wissenschaftler Moose und der potenzielle Terrorist Michael West, beide Außenseiter, die hellsichtig ihre Umwelt sehen, mit ihrer Aggressivität und Wut kämpfen, mit dem Feuer spielen. Dagegen die beiden Charlottes, die eine schön, die andere unscheinbar. Auch hier wird der Unterschied zwischen Sichtbarkeit und Unsichtbarkeit thematisiert.
February 15, 2013
Jennifer Egan has got to be one of the most ambitious writers of fiction working today. I loved both The Keep and A Visit From the Goon Squad, and I'd been looking forward to Look at Me for a good while. Finally I gave myself the gift of time with it.
The themes Egan deals with here are dynamite: our hyper-visual culture, the blurred dichotomy between a person's "inside" and "outside," double and triple lives, mutable identities, identities that crumble due to madness. She's intuited the connections between these disparate conditions and pursued them to the max.
Egan has written and spoken very generously about her writing process and about how much she revises her work, but her prose is so intelligent and fluid that one can be lulled into thinking: It came out just like this. These are prismatic and memorable characters: Moose, a high school hero who cracks up in young adulthood; Charlotte, a model who comes out of a cataclysmic car accident with a brand-new face; another Charlotte, a high school girl who pursues a secret sexual affair with a teacher; Irene, an academic devoted to the truth who finds an unexpected liberation in making stuff up. And finally, there's Z, a terrorist plant from the Middle East, his attempts to pass as an American, and his tottering on the line between hatred of and seduction by Western culture.
Is Look at Me a perfect book? A novel this complicated couldn't possibly be. About two-thirds of the way in the pace lags a bit, and I found some unsatisfying elements in the conclusion. Hard to care, though, when one's been taken on such a wild and brilliant ride.
The themes Egan deals with here are dynamite: our hyper-visual culture, the blurred dichotomy between a person's "inside" and "outside," double and triple lives, mutable identities, identities that crumble due to madness. She's intuited the connections between these disparate conditions and pursued them to the max.
Egan has written and spoken very generously about her writing process and about how much she revises her work, but her prose is so intelligent and fluid that one can be lulled into thinking: It came out just like this. These are prismatic and memorable characters: Moose, a high school hero who cracks up in young adulthood; Charlotte, a model who comes out of a cataclysmic car accident with a brand-new face; another Charlotte, a high school girl who pursues a secret sexual affair with a teacher; Irene, an academic devoted to the truth who finds an unexpected liberation in making stuff up. And finally, there's Z, a terrorist plant from the Middle East, his attempts to pass as an American, and his tottering on the line between hatred of and seduction by Western culture.
Is Look at Me a perfect book? A novel this complicated couldn't possibly be. About two-thirds of the way in the pace lags a bit, and I found some unsatisfying elements in the conclusion. Hard to care, though, when one's been taken on such a wild and brilliant ride.
February 12, 2018
Mentre cerchiamo di scoprire il mistero di noi stessi , di coglierlo di sorpresa, di svelarne il polso, i riflessi, la peristalsi , la verità è sfuggita, infilandosi in un anfratto buio e tortuoso ancora più profondo che si alimenta da sé come il sangue.
Devo dire che questo libro di Jennifer Egan (che non conoscevo per niente) mi ha colpito molto , molto di più di quello che mi aspettavo
Sarà che la protagonista detesta parlare di se stessa ,
saranno quei dialoghi , sarà che quelle dinamiche ...
Non so bene , ma i personaggi sono così ben caratterizzati che hai la sensazione di averli davvero "incontrati",
li hai visti cambiare, "crescere" , hai sentito le loro emozioni (o le hai riconosciute)
(quasi avresti voluto abbracciarli ... Moose... mi hai fatto piangere !)
Guardami parla del rapporto tra l'immagine , la percezione che il "mondo" ha di noi e l'identità .
Di come quella percezione influenzi la percezione che noi abbiamo di noi stessi (detto in modo un po' marzullesco :D)
E parla di dissimulazione, della finzione nei rapporti con gli altri , della facilità e della grande velocità di accesso ai nostri dati , che vanno a costituire dei "profili"
e della sostanziale inaccessibilità delle persone .
Della solitudine di "indossare" la propria vita , come un brand e
della vacuità (molto glamour ) di fare della bellezza un mestiere .
Dell'allerta e dell' attesa .
A volte poi ci si riconosce , basta qualche attenzione , una parvenza d'amore , di innocenza, di forza .
Mistero o schiettezza .
Devo dire che questo libro di Jennifer Egan (che non conoscevo per niente) mi ha colpito molto , molto di più di quello che mi aspettavo
Sarà che la protagonista detesta parlare di se stessa ,
saranno quei dialoghi , sarà che quelle dinamiche ...
Non so bene , ma i personaggi sono così ben caratterizzati che hai la sensazione di averli davvero "incontrati",
li hai visti cambiare, "crescere" , hai sentito le loro emozioni (o le hai riconosciute)
(quasi avresti voluto abbracciarli ... Moose... mi hai fatto piangere !)
Guardami parla del rapporto tra l'immagine , la percezione che il "mondo" ha di noi e l'identità .
Di come quella percezione influenzi la percezione che noi abbiamo di noi stessi (detto in modo un po' marzullesco :D)
E parla di dissimulazione, della finzione nei rapporti con gli altri , della facilità e della grande velocità di accesso ai nostri dati , che vanno a costituire dei "profili"
e della sostanziale inaccessibilità delle persone .
Della solitudine di "indossare" la propria vita , come un brand e
della vacuità (molto glamour ) di fare della bellezza un mestiere .
Dell'allerta e dell' attesa .
A volte poi ci si riconosce , basta qualche attenzione , una parvenza d'amore , di innocenza, di forza .
Mistero o schiettezza .
November 12, 2012
Our book club usually meets at a restaurant, but one of our members is a newly minted Mary Kay rep (ask me about my eyeliner!) so we decided to meet at a member's house and have a combined meeting/Mary Kay presentation. In the spirit of beauty and identity and over-thinking everything, we decided to read a book which discussed those issues, so I asked Goodreads to recommend something, and this book is what it (you? we?) came up with.
I'm sure there is a great novel out there which deals with issues of beauty, vanity, identity, femininity and women's societally-imposed obligation to be ornamental, but this isn't it. This book really needed editing; lots and lots of editing. There are too many pointless characters, too many words with not enough action, and too many intriguing ideas introduced and then abandoned.
It's disappointing because I started off really liking Egan's writing style and enjoying the protagonist's voice, but it all got bogged down.
I'm sure there is a great novel out there which deals with issues of beauty, vanity, identity, femininity and women's societally-imposed obligation to be ornamental, but this isn't it. This book really needed editing; lots and lots of editing. There are too many pointless characters, too many words with not enough action, and too many intriguing ideas introduced and then abandoned.
It's disappointing because I started off really liking Egan's writing style and enjoying the protagonist's voice, but it all got bogged down.
January 6, 2013
Jennifer Egan is, to my mind, one of the finest storytellers writing in English today. Look at Me is an extraordinary accomplishment. It's an intricate tale, weaving two main narratives and handful of other voices into a fictional firmament of breathtaking intricacy and eminent believability. It's also a philosophical consideration of identity, persona and the kinds of truths we're unwilling to admit even to ourselves.
I don't want to give too much away; immerse yourself in the beauty of the prose, and go on the journey with Egan and her Charlottes. Look at Me is a book that gives back much more than it takes.
I don't want to give too much away; immerse yourself in the beauty of the prose, and go on the journey with Egan and her Charlottes. Look at Me is a book that gives back much more than it takes.
July 30, 2009
"Look At Me" is an astonishingly prescient story that examines our culture's obsession with image, fame, consumerism. On one hand, it chronicles a culture that rose rapidly and is deteriorating even more quickly; on the other hand, it explores individuals' responses to the way they are perceived by society. It's deep. But it's also hilarious, brilliant, truly original.
The author, Jennifer Egan, uses a combination of first-person and third-person omniscient POVs to illustrate the lives of a glamorous New York model, a terrorist, a 16-year-old Midwestern girl and alcoholic private detective, culminating in their intersection in Rockford, IL. As Egan delves into the psyches of her characters she creates a pace that makes the book hard to put down, but also renders many passages re-readable for their sheer depth and/or beauty of her language. Egan is at once storyteller, poet, visionary, scientist, anthropologist. This work is truly masterful.
A National Book Award Finalist, "Look At Me" is an ambitious, important work. It's thought-provoking, but also fun. The book was published in 2001--pre 9/11. The book is also pre-Facebook and most of the other social networks that keep us glued to our computers, yet it predicts the advent of these media with stunning accuracy. Egan has left me awestruck.
The author, Jennifer Egan, uses a combination of first-person and third-person omniscient POVs to illustrate the lives of a glamorous New York model, a terrorist, a 16-year-old Midwestern girl and alcoholic private detective, culminating in their intersection in Rockford, IL. As Egan delves into the psyches of her characters she creates a pace that makes the book hard to put down, but also renders many passages re-readable for their sheer depth and/or beauty of her language. Egan is at once storyteller, poet, visionary, scientist, anthropologist. This work is truly masterful.
A National Book Award Finalist, "Look At Me" is an ambitious, important work. It's thought-provoking, but also fun. The book was published in 2001--pre 9/11. The book is also pre-Facebook and most of the other social networks that keep us glued to our computers, yet it predicts the advent of these media with stunning accuracy. Egan has left me awestruck.
March 29, 2011
meh. It's been a while since I enjoyed a book so little and still read it all the way to the end. If anyone thought I was like the Paula Abdul of Goodreads for my mostly 4- and 5-star reviews, it's really more that I rarely bother to keep going if I don't think something is that great. But I had just finished "A Visit from the Goon Squad," which I loved, and I'm seeing Egan at BAM soon, and it was a National Book Award finalist, fer crissakes. But meh. You know, there are a lot of interesting and probably thought-provoking ideas in there, but I didn't enjoy reading this at all.
I was talking with a friend about "Freedom" recently - she mentioned it as an example of book that manages to be enjoyable in spite of its lack of any likeable characters. I protested that I liked some of the characters - Patty and Richard, mainly - but then on later consideration realized that likeable wasn't the word. They were sympathetic, maybe, and interesting, and real. In the case of "Look at Me," the protagonist is none of those things...nor is anyone else. There are also a lot of references that feel dated, only 10 years after it was published. Ehhh, I don't know why I'm writing so much about a book I didn't like. Anyway.
I was talking with a friend about "Freedom" recently - she mentioned it as an example of book that manages to be enjoyable in spite of its lack of any likeable characters. I protested that I liked some of the characters - Patty and Richard, mainly - but then on later consideration realized that likeable wasn't the word. They were sympathetic, maybe, and interesting, and real. In the case of "Look at Me," the protagonist is none of those things...nor is anyone else. There are also a lot of references that feel dated, only 10 years after it was published. Ehhh, I don't know why I'm writing so much about a book I didn't like. Anyway.
October 3, 2009
I gave up after 58 pages. Didn't like it at all. Not sure who the main character is or what the author was trying to convey. Found her writing too forced/too descriptive. I'm all about a good similie but this book is overly peppered them (cheap pepper that is; the finely ground stuff that tastes like spicy dirt).
Examples:
"She felt like an old radio issuing weird, splintering frequencies..."
"...whose catcher's mitt hands now hung at his sides, insensate as loaves of bread."
Also, her sentences meander and trip over themselves!
Example:
"Nowadays, the action lay on the river's east side, where Charlotte lived, whose vital artery was not the river at all but State Street, running west to east, accruing strip malls and superstores and condominium spuds as it moved farther from the old city center until, by the time it reached the interstate, five miles out, it encompassed six lanes of traffic."
YIKES! This sentence made me dizzy and set my compass AWAY from Charlotte, State Street and anywhere else this author might want to take me.
Examples:
"She felt like an old radio issuing weird, splintering frequencies..."
"...whose catcher's mitt hands now hung at his sides, insensate as loaves of bread."
Also, her sentences meander and trip over themselves!
Example:
"Nowadays, the action lay on the river's east side, where Charlotte lived, whose vital artery was not the river at all but State Street, running west to east, accruing strip malls and superstores and condominium spuds as it moved farther from the old city center until, by the time it reached the interstate, five miles out, it encompassed six lanes of traffic."
YIKES! This sentence made me dizzy and set my compass AWAY from Charlotte, State Street and anywhere else this author might want to take me.
June 28, 2008
Egan's lyric and poetic storytelling style immediately captured me, as did the compelling voice of protagonist Charlotte Swenson, who narrates several chapters of this novel throughout her convalescence from the horrifying car accident that opens the book. Along with Charlotte, Egan amasses an interesting cast of characters, each of them exploring how they construct their identities.
It was a fairly quick read that I couldn't easily put down. There is an interesting commentary on technology and culture near the end of the novel, and particularly on our fame-obsessed culture.
It was a fairly quick read that I couldn't easily put down. There is an interesting commentary on technology and culture near the end of the novel, and particularly on our fame-obsessed culture.
October 31, 2014
I didn't fall in love as quickly or rapturously as "A visit from the goon squad," but the writing is quite good, and it's drawing me in.
I finished it. Enthralled. Five stars.
I finished it. Enthralled. Five stars.
May 10, 2014
Jennifer Egan's authorial voice is a truly stunning blend of approachable and innovative. In A Visit from the Goon Squad I was floored by this rising crescendo of identity studies, layers of perspective that architected a novel that felt, for once, novel. If you read that first, as I did, then turn to Look at Me, it becomes clear that identity and our struggle to find and articulate it is a central thesis that Egan returns to in different ways.
Egan gives Charlotte Swenson the central, starring role and the only first-person narrative perspective. The other central characters we see through a third-person lens, one step removed from what would seem like intimacy of "I." But, it becomes quickly clear, Charlotte is not capable of intimacy. Even sitting directly behind her eyes, readers cannot access her story directly because she cannot access it herself. Charlotte struggles to create a meaningful existence for herself by attempting to reassume control over her story and thus, her identity. She discovers through various flailing attempts at self-discovery and self-assertion, that she is in fact powerless to do anything other than distill her fractured identity and sell it in an absurd but simultaneously completely credible way. (This novel, written pre-facebook and pre 9/11, presents an alternate near-history of how we might have arrived at this place in time in the same way that Eggers' The Circle presents a possible near-future suggested by our present.)
The other, third-person narrated, central characters grapple with their own identity challenges as they try desperately to sear away the artifice and find honesty and solid, unshakeable truth beneath what they see as a false and constricting artifice. For young Charlotte and Z, this search results in construction of elaborate set-piece identities that they present to the world while they each pivot inward to nurture something more personal. Moose, the character who engages most directly with the gap between perception and reality, is the most openly tortured by it. He had a moment of supreme clarity from which he was never able to emerge, rendering him mentally ill and shoved to the edges of a society that he no longer knows how to interact with. While supremely human and sympathetic, he is hampered by a Causabon-like poverty of ideas -- there is no there there, no vision that can be translated into meaning that others can "see" with him.
All along the threads of this novel as they weave and converge, identity emerges as a consistently visual phenomenon. We are what we see. Or, perhaps, because we cannot truly see ourselves clearly, we are inevitably what others see, or the result of what we succeed or fail to make them see. When the sentences of the narrative shift from one perspective to another, sometimes looping in and out between the characters within the same sentence, we experience a blurriness of vision in narrative form and recognize, for just a moment, ourselves in there too.
Egan gives Charlotte Swenson the central, starring role and the only first-person narrative perspective. The other central characters we see through a third-person lens, one step removed from what would seem like intimacy of "I." But, it becomes quickly clear, Charlotte is not capable of intimacy. Even sitting directly behind her eyes, readers cannot access her story directly because she cannot access it herself. Charlotte struggles to create a meaningful existence for herself by attempting to reassume control over her story and thus, her identity. She discovers through various flailing attempts at self-discovery and self-assertion, that she is in fact powerless to do anything other than distill her fractured identity and sell it in an absurd but simultaneously completely credible way. (This novel, written pre-facebook and pre 9/11, presents an alternate near-history of how we might have arrived at this place in time in the same way that Eggers' The Circle presents a possible near-future suggested by our present.)
The other, third-person narrated, central characters grapple with their own identity challenges as they try desperately to sear away the artifice and find honesty and solid, unshakeable truth beneath what they see as a false and constricting artifice. For young Charlotte and Z, this search results in construction of elaborate set-piece identities that they present to the world while they each pivot inward to nurture something more personal. Moose, the character who engages most directly with the gap between perception and reality, is the most openly tortured by it. He had a moment of supreme clarity from which he was never able to emerge, rendering him mentally ill and shoved to the edges of a society that he no longer knows how to interact with. While supremely human and sympathetic, he is hampered by a Causabon-like poverty of ideas -- there is no there there, no vision that can be translated into meaning that others can "see" with him.
All along the threads of this novel as they weave and converge, identity emerges as a consistently visual phenomenon. We are what we see. Or, perhaps, because we cannot truly see ourselves clearly, we are inevitably what others see, or the result of what we succeed or fail to make them see. When the sentences of the narrative shift from one perspective to another, sometimes looping in and out between the characters within the same sentence, we experience a blurriness of vision in narrative form and recognize, for just a moment, ourselves in there too.
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