Word: egans
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...recently made into a film starring Cameron Diaz and Jordana Brewster. Look At Me, her second novel, is the product of more than five years of work. As a contributor to publications such as The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and Harper’s, Egan has written frequently on issues of image, identity and technology. Much of the research for these articles handily doubled as research for the novel...
While the social commentary forms a significant part of the novel, Look At Me functions best as a purely literary work, thanks in large part to Egan’s remarkable narrative skill. Egan mixes flashbacks, stream of consciousness narratives and intellectual diatribes with careless ease to create a fitfully paced, engaging narrative that gradually builds in power. Her descriptions are precise and highly evocative. Charlotte details the reawakening of her memory: “The boredom and stasis of my present circumstances were driving me to retrospect in the desultory way that a person cooped...
Egan’s greatest achievement is the cast of characters she assembles, each of whom we come to know in painstaking, brutally honest and innovative detail, but whose actions and thoughts we can never quite predict. Egan presents her characters as is, indifferent to whether we like them, never purporting to explain them completely. We remain emotionally invested in characters who do despicable things...
...literary adroitness that the novel exhibits, Look At Me, or, more precisely, its message, is extremely hard to swallow. Egan is undeniably an incisive and perceptive commentator. Certain aspects of the novel seem eerily prescient; she conceived of the essentials of its plot in 1995. The supremacy of globalization, the rise of reality-TV, the rise of insidious terrorism: Look At Me contains them all. Yet her prognosis for America seems to be nightmarishly overdrawn and more seriously, fundamentally misanthropic. Though American culture may be plumbing new depths, it has not sunk to the level where...
...Jennifer Egan...