Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Oakdale Library | FICTION EGA | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION EGA | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
In her first novel since her widely praised debut,The Invisible Circus, Jennifer Egan demonstrates once again her virtuosity at weaving a spellbinding story with language that dazzles. In this boldly ambitious and symphonic novel, she captures the tenor of our times and offers an unsettling glimpse of the future. Fashion model Charlotte Swenson returns to Manhattan, having just recovered from a catastrophic car accident in her hometown of Rockford, Illinois. The skin of her face is perfect, but behind it lie eighty titanium screws that hold together the bones that were shattered when she hit the unbreakable windscreen of her car. Unrecognizable to her peers and colleagues, Charlotte finds it impossible to resume her former life. Instead, she floats invisibly through a world of fashion nightclubs and edgy Internet projects, where image and reality are indistinguishable. During her recovery in Rockford, she had met another Charlotte, the plain-looking teenage daughter of her former best friend. Young Charlotte, alienated from parents and friends, has come under the sway of two men: her uncle, a mentally unstable scholar of the Industrial Revolution, and an enigmatic high school teacher whom she seduces. In following these tales to their eerie convergence,Look at Meis both a send-up of image culture in America and a mystery of human identity. Egan illuminates the difficulties of shaping an inner life in a culture obsessed with surfaces and asks whether "truth" can have any meaning in an era when reality itself has become a style. Written with powerful intelligence and grace,Look at Meclearly establishes Jennifer Egan as one of the most daring and gifted novelists of her generation. From the Hardcover edition.
Author Notes
Jennifer Egan was born in Chicago, Illinois on September 6, 1962. She attended the University of Pennsylvania and St. John's College, Cambridge. She is the author of The Invisible Circus, Look at Me, Emerald City and Other Stories, The Keep, and Manhattan Beach, which won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in 2018. Her title, A Visit from the Goon Squad, won both the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Her short stories have appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, Harpers, and Granta. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship. Her non-fiction articles appear frequently in the New York Times Magazine and have won a number of awards.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Equipped with an arresting premise, Egan's hip and haunting second novel (after The Invisible Circus) gets off to a promising start. Thirty-five-year-old Charlotte, a thoroughly unpleasant Manhattan-based model who escaped the middle-class nothingness of her upbringing in Rockford, Ill., then spent her adult life getting by on appearances, literally loses her face in a catastrophic car accident back in Rockford. As Charlotte's rebuilt face heals and she goes unrecognized at the restaurants and nightclubs that were her old haunts, she must grapple with the lives and losses she has tried to outrun a fractured childhood friendship, the fiance she betrayed and "Z," a suspicious man from an unidentified Middle Eastern country. Anthony Halliday, an attractive, tormented private investigator, interrupts Charlotte's isolation. Hired by a pair of nightclub owners to track down Z because he absconded with a pile of their money, Halliday carries the scent of romance, but he also kicks off a chain of introductions that bizarrely lands Charlotte in the "mirrored room" of great fame. She is reconnected with her past at the same time that she becomes part of a brave new Internet world, where identity itself is a consumable commodity. Oddly, this narrative alternates with that of her old friend Ellen's daughter (also named Charlotte), whose life in Rockford centers around two older men. Though expertly constructed and seductively knowing, Egan's tale is marred by the overblown trendiness at its core. Charlotte (the model, who progresses from horrid to just bearable by the end) and the others come to the same realization: a world ruled by the consumerist values bred by mass production and mass information is "a world constructed from the outside in." The Buddha said it better. National advertising; author tour. (Sept. 18) FYI: Egan's writing appears in publications like the New Yorker and Harper's, and The Invisible Circus was recently made into a film featuring Cameron Diaz. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Egan's insightfulness and finesse were obvious in her first novel, The Invisible Circus (1994), and she now ascends to an even higher plane in this prodigious tale of the conflict between self and image, life and spin. It all begins in modest Rockford, Illinois, where Charlotte starts to plot her escape practically from birth. Spiky and elusive, she becomes a big-time fashion model, then nearly dies in a car crash on a spontaneous trip back to her hometown. Her famous face is so thoroughly smashed that 80 titanium screws are used to reconstruct it; the result is a visage no one recognizes and a life in shambles. Charlotte's groping for a new sense of self is paired with the coming-of-age struggles of another Charlotte, the teenage daughter of Big Charlotte's former best friend. The disturbing metamorphoses the two Charlottes experience are linked, in turn, to the fate of an enigmatic man called Z, who may be a Lebanese terrorist, and Little Charlotte's Uncle Moose, a man tormented by the dark side of technology. This is a masterfully plotted, unceasingly dramatic novel whose thrilling and provocative power lies in its hard-edged mirroring of our franchised, online, and wildly decadent world. Donna Seaman
Guardian Review
Jennifer Egan is so hot right now. Her new book? It's about a model! And the quote on the back saying how marvellous it is? Vogue, darling! Actually, that's unfair. Jennifer Egan is indeed very hot right now, but she's no mere fashion-froth. Her most recent novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won two of America's most prestigious literary awards - the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Critics Circle award - and received excellent write-ups everywhere. Accordingly, her delighted publishers have trawled her backlist and reissued Look at Me, first published 10 years ago to rather less fanfare. Egan took six years to write Look at Me, and it shows: this is a sprawling, ambitious novel that links together some of the most diverse characters you could imagine. There is Moose, a middle-aged ex-jock turned erratic history professor, still reeling from an epiphany he experienced years ago, on a grassy bank overlooking the interstate highway. There is Charlotte, a speccy teenager longing for love while her brother recovers from leukaemia. There is a furious Lebanese terrorist, a happily married academic and an unhappily divorced private detective. There is - most strikingly - another, older Charlotte, this one a model from New York who has been in a disastrous car accident. Her face has been reconstructed with 80 titanium screws; once her livelihood, it is now a mask she hides behind as she walks past old friends, even lovers, who show no sign of recognition. This Charlotte dominates the first half of the book, and her narrative provides most of the fun in the book. Callous, impulsive and selfish (who wants to read about a saintly model?), she tries to claw her way back into the glossy Manhattan fashion circle, but finds her new face no longer passes muster. Her descent into drink, despair and so on could have been cliched, but Egan gives her much more depth than that. Charlotte follows in the steps of modern literature's two great Manhattan fast-lane, high-life dumb-asses: John Self, in Martin Amis's Money, and Victor Ward in Bret Easton Ellis's Glamorama. They all think they know the score, and they all have no clue. Charlotte's foible is that she believes she can glimpse people's "shadow selves", the true characters behind their public personas. She's often hilariously wrong, but it shows the importance of seeing and being seen in this very image-conscious book. "Being observed felt like an action, the only one worth taking," Charlotte tells us as she explains why she became a model. "Anything else seemed passive, futile by comparison." A critic could write a long essay on the novel's sophisticated treatment of perception, image, media and identity. Luckily for you, I won't. What more people have found exciting here is the uncanny way in which many of Egan's futuristic visions have come true. She began the book in the mid-1990s, long before the US succumbed to reality TV in the form of Survivor (The Real World, their equivalent of Big Brother, was older but not so popular), and when webcams were almost unheard of. And yet here we have a dotcom start-up approaching Charlotte in the hope that she'll let them record and webcast every detail of her daily life: memories, dreams, audio, video. There is a very good - and spookily prescient - scene in which the dotcom's CEO explains to Charlotte how her recordings, and those of other "Ordinary PeopleTM", will offer paying viewers access to an authenticity they lack in their own lives. "TV tries to satisfy that, books, movies - they try, but they're all so lame - so mediated! They're just not real enough." Needless to say, his idea of reality includes heavy editing, product endorsement, Hollywood tie-ins, beefed-up drama and tension: "We don't want shit happens, we want shit happens for a reason." As satire, all this misfires somewhat, since we now know that no one would pay for access to webcasts of someone's daily life and thoughts; why would they, when half the world's population, it seems, is clamouring to tell you about theirs for free? But as a commentary on how our own stories are mediated, commodified and shone back at us as if from a distorting mirror, it's spot-on. There's a lot more going on here, but some of it may not be of much interest to non-American readers. The town of Rockford, Illinois gets a lot of attention; Moose, the professor, is obsessed with its industrial past, in a rather long-winded, metaphorical way. And there are many more minor characters than I have room to describe. When the climax brings them all together, it feels at once implausible and wearily predictable, as so often with novels that have large casts. But there is a lot here to mull over and enjoy, and if it lacks the pith and zest of Goon Squad, it certainly deserves its second chance on the bookshelves. To order Look at Me for pounds 7.19 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846. - Carrie O'Grady Charlotte follows in the steps of modern literature's two great Manhattan fast-lane, high-life dumb-asses: John Self, in Martin Amis's Money, and Victor Ward in Bret Easton Ellis's Glamorama. They all think they know the score, and they all have no clue. Charlotte's foible is that she believes she can glimpse people's "shadow selves", the true characters behind their public personas. She's often hilariously wrong, but it shows the importance of seeing and being seen in this very image-conscious book. "Being observed felt like an action, the only one worth taking," Charlotte tells us as she explains why she became a model. "Anything else seemed passive, futile by comparison." - Carrie O'Grady.
Kirkus Review
In her sprawling, ambitious second novel, Egan (The Invisible Circus, 1995) questions the shift in America's cultural underpinnings from industry to information, using as dual settings the hip fashion world of Manhattan and the nation's demographic and geographic middle, represented by Rockford, Illinois. Fashion model Charlotte Swenson is driving from New York to her hometown when a car crash breaks all the bones in her face. Convalescing in Rockford, she sneaks into her long-estranged best friend Ellen's house, where she encounters Ellen's teenage daughter, also named Charlotte. Back in New York, Charlotte Swenson, her facial bones held together with titanium screws, tries to rebuild her faltering career. How people see her has always defined her, but now friends and associates don't see her at all; though unscarred, her face is unrecognizable. After blowing both professional and romantic opportunities, she sinks into despair until a botched suicide attempt (one of the novel's few humorous moments) wakes her up and she begins building a new life. Meanwhile, back in Rockford, young Charlotte, whose family has been rocked by her younger brother's leukemia, begins to study Rockford's history under the tutelage of her Uncle Moose. A high-school football star and fired Yale professor whose intellectual insights have driven him toward madness, Moose is perhaps the most disarming, delicately nuanced character in a novel full of interesting supporting players. Young Charlotte becomes sexually obsessed and then involved with a mysterious stranger named Michael West, whose arrival in Rockford coincides over-neatly with Charlotte Swenson's accident and who seems manufactured from John le Carre spare parts. Egan reminds us too often that her philosophical concern is with appearance: how what is seen defines what is. But any impatience with overwriting and plot manipulations is overwhelmed by the ever-present page-turning energy. A surprisingly satisfying stew of philosophy, social commentary, and storytelling.
Library Journal Review
Charlotte, a successful thirtyish model, miraculously survives a horrific car crash near Rockford, IL, her despised hometown. However, reconstructive facial surgery alters her appearance irrevocably. Within the fashion world, where one's look is one's self, she has become literally unrecognizable. Seeking a new image, Charlotte stumbles into a tantalizing Internet experiment that may both save and damn her. Back in Rockford, another Charlotte, this one a plain, unhappy teenager, wonders who she really is. Her search for self drives her to extremes; she maintains a tortuous sexual liaison with a mysterious high school math teacher and takes on an eerie scholar-disciple role opposite her unbalanced Uncle Moose, who is obsessed by his unorthodox theories about the Industrial Revolution. The intersections of these and the novel's other intriguing characters raise tantalizing questions about identity and reality in contemporary American culture. Egan continues to fulfill the literary promise she showed in her previous fiction, The Invisible Circus and Emerald City. Recommended for most collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/01.] Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty P.L., VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter One 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. In my memory, the accident has acquired a harsh, dazzling beauty: white sunlight, a slow loop through space like being on the Tilt-A-Whirl (always a favorite of mine), feeling my body move faster than, and counter to, the vehicle containing it. Then a bright, splintering crack as I burst through the windshield into the open air, bloody and frightened and uncomprehending. The truth is that I don't remember anything. The accident happened at night during an August downpour on a deserted stretch of highway through corn and soybean fields, a few miles outside Rockford, Illinois, my hometown. I hit the brakes and my face collided with the windshield, knocking me out instantly. Thus I was spared the adventure of my car veering off the tollway into a cornfield, rolling several times, bursting into flame and ultimately exploding. The air bags didn't inflate; I could sue, of course, but since I wasn't wearing my seatbelt, it's probably a good thing they didn't inflate, or I might have been decapitated, adding injury to insult, you might say. The shatterproof windshield did indeed hold fast upon its impact with my head, so although I broke virtually every bone in my face, I have almost no visible scars. I owe my life to what is known as a "Good Samaritan" someone who pulled me out of the flaming wreck so promptly that only my hair was burned, someone who laid me gently on the perimeter of the cornfield, called an ambulance, described my location with some precision and then, with a self-effacement that strikes me as perverse, not to mention un-American, chose to slink away anonymously rather than take credit for these sterling deeds. A passing motorist in a hurry, that sort of thing. The ambulance took me to Rockford Memorial Hospital, where I fell into the hands of one Dr. Hans Fabermann, reconstructive surgeon extraordinaire. When I emerged from unconsciousness fourteen hours later, it was Dr. Fabermann who sat beside me, an elderly man with a broad, muscular jaw and tufts of white hair in both ears, though most of this I didn't see that night -- I could hardly see at all. Calmly Dr. Fabermann explained that I was lucky; I'd broken ribs, arm and leg, but had no internal injuries to speak of. My face was in the midst of what he called a "golden time" before the "grotesque swelling" would set in. If he operated immediately, he could get a jump on my "gross asymmetry"--namely, the disconnection of my cheekbones from my upper skull and of my lower jaw from my "midface." I had no idea where I was, or what had happened to me. My face was numb, I saw with slurry double vision and had an odd sensation around my mouth as if my upper and lower teeth were out of whack. I felt a hand on mine, and realized then that my sister, Grace, was at my bedside. I sensed the vibration of her terror, and it induced in me a familiar desire to calm her, Grace curled against me in bed during a thunderstorm, the smell of cedar, wet leaves.... . It's fine, I wanted to say. It's a golden time. "If we don't operate now, we'll have to wait five or six days for the swelling to go down," Dr. Fabermann said. I tried to speak, to acquiesce, but no moving parts of my head would move. I produced one of those aerated gurgles made by movie characters expiring from war wounds. Then I closed my eyes. But apparently Dr. Fabermann understood, because he operated that night. After twelve hours of surgery, during which eighty titanium screws were implanted in the crushed bones of my face to connect and hold them together; after I'd been sliced from ear to ear over the crown of my head so Dr. Fabermann could peel down the skin from my forehead and reattach my cheekbones to my upper skull; after incisions were made inside my mouth so that he could connect my lower and upper jaws; after eleven days during which my sister fluttered by my hospital bed like a squeamish angel while her husband, Frank Jones, whom I loathed and who loathed me, stayed home with my two nieces and nephew--I was discharged from the hospital. I found myself at a strange crossroads. I had spent my youth awaiting the chance to bolt from Rockford, Illinois, and had done so the moment I was able. I'd visited rarely, to the chagrin of my parents and sister, and what visits I made were impetuous, cranky and short. In my real life, as I thought of it, I had actively concealed my connection to Rockford, telling people I was from Chicago, if I told even that. But much as I longed to return to New York after the accident, to pad barefoot on the fluffy white carpeting of my twenty-fifth floor apartment overlooking the East River, the fact that I lived alone made this impossible. My right leg and left arm were sheathed in plaster. My face was just entering the "angry healing phase": black bruises extending down to my chest, the whites of my eyes a monstrous red; a swollen, basketball-sized head with stitches across the crown (an improvement over the staples they'd used initially). My head was partly shaved, and what hair remained was singed, rank smelling and falling out in bunches. Pain, mercifully, wasn't a problem; nerve damage had left me mostly numb, particularly from my eyes down, though I did have excruciating headaches. I wanted to stay near Dr. Fabermann, though he insisted, with classic midwestern self-deprecation, that I would find his surgical equal, or superior, in New York. But New York was for the strong, and I was weak--so weak! I slept nearly all the time. It seemed fitting that I nurse my weakness in a place I had always associated with the meek, the lame, and the useless. And so, to the bewilderment of my friends and colleagues at home, to the pain of my sister, whose husband refused to have me under his roof (not that I could have borne it), she arranged for me to move into the home of an old friend of our parents', Mary Cunningham, who lived just east of the Rock River on Ridgewood Road, near the house where we grew up. My parents had long since moved to Arizona, where my father's lungs were slowly dissolving from emphysema, and where my mother had come to believe in the power of certain oddly shaped stones, which she arranged on his gasping chest at night while he slept. "Please let me come," my mother pleaded with me over the phone, having assembled healing pouches full of herbs and feathers and teeth. But no, I said, please. Stay with Dad. "I'll be fine," I told her, "Grace will take care of me," and even through my croaking stranger's voice I heard a resolve that was familiar to me--and no doubt to my mother. I would take care of myself. I always had. Mrs. Cunningham had become an old woman since I knew her as the lady who used a broom to chase away neighborhood kids trying to scoop the billowing goldfish from her murky backyard pond. The fish, or their descendants, were still there, visible in flashes of gold-speckled white among a snarl of moss and lily pads. The house smelled of dust and dead flowers, the closets were full of old hats. The lives of Mrs. Cunningham's dead husband and her children who lived far away were still in that house, asleep in the cedar-filled attic, which is doubtless why she, an old woman with a bum hip, was still living there, struggling up that flight of stairs when most of her widowed, bridge-playing friends had decamped long ago to spiffy apartments. She tucked me into bed in one of her daughters' rooms and seemed to enjoy a renaissance of second motherhood, bringing me tea and juice which I drank from a baby cup, slipping knitted booties on my feet and feeding me Gerber apricot puree, which I lapped down lustily. She had the lawn boy carry the TV up to my room, and in the evenings would recline on the twin bed beside mine, her waxen, veiny calves exposed beneath the hem of her padded bathrobe. Together we watched the local news, where I learned that even in Rockford, drug gangs had come to rule the streets, and drive-by shootings were the norm. "When I think what this town used to be," Mrs. Cunningham would mutter as she watched, alluding to the postwar years when she and her husband, Ralph, had chosen Rockford above all American cities as the ideal place to make their home. "The most prosperous community in the nation," some erstwhile pundit named Roger Babson had apparently anointed it; Mary Cunningham went so far as to heft a musty tome onto my bed and jab her bent, trembling finger at the very quotation. I sensed her bitterness, her disgust at the grave miscalculation that left her now, in her solitude, obliged by memory and experience to love a place she had come to despise. It was four weeks before I left the house to do anything more than herd my various limbs into Grace's car for visits to Dr. Fabermann and his associate, Dr. Pine, who was tending to my broken bones. When he implanted a walking plug in my leg cast, I ventured outside for the very first time in zebra-striped sunglasses Mary Cunningham had worn in the sixties, Mary herself at my side, to walk gingerly through my old neighborhood. I hadn't returned to this part of town since Grace had left for college, at which point my parents had bought a smaller place on a bit of land east of town, near the interstate, and a horse, Daffodil, whom my father rode until he was too short of breath. By now it was late September; I had tracked the passing days in the obsessive belief that if I measured the time, it wouldn't really be lost. We stepped through a warm breeze toward the house on Brownwood Drive where I had lain in bed for several thousand nights, staring into a cat's cradle of Elm trees that were slowly expiring from Dutch elm disease, where I'd listened to Supertramp albums in a basement with orange indoor- outdoor carpeting laid over the concrete, where I'd stood before a mirror in a prom dress, my mother plucking at its petals of rayon--and yet, for all that, a house I'd thought of hardly ever since I'd left. And there it was: flat, ranch-style, covered with yellow bricks that must have been pasted on from outside, a square of crisp green lawn tucked like a napkin under its chin. So indistinguishable was this house from tens of thousands of others in Rockford that I turned to Mary Cunningham and asked, "Are you sure this is it?" She looked puzzled, then laughed, no doubt reminding herself that my vision was worse than hers at the moment, that I was doped up on painkillers. And yet, as we were turning to go, I had what I guess was a memory: this house against a dawn sky as I jogged toward it from my best friend Ellen Metcalf's house, where I'd spent the night. The feeling of seeing it there--my house, with everything I knew inside it. The experience of that memory was like being hit, or kissed, unexpectedly. I blinked to recover from it. The next week, I made my way on crutches to the Rock River, where a park and jogging path meandered along the water's eastern edge. I gazed hungrily at the path, longing to visit the rose garden and duck pond farther north along it, but knowing I didn't have the strength. Instead, I used a pay phone in the parking lot beside the YMCA to call my answering machine; Mrs. Cunningham's phones were all rotaries. It had now been seven weeks since the accident, and the outgoing message I'd instructed my sister to leave on my machine explaining my plight while not revealing that I'd left my apartment--lest it get robbed, which would really have finished me--had provoked a rash of messages from worried friends that Grace had been dutifully collecting. But there were a couple she hadn't retrieved yet. One from Oscar, my booker, who yelled through a polyphony of ringing phones that seemed otherworldly to me now, "Just checking in, sweet. Call when you've regained the gift of speech." He'd been calling every day, my sister said. Oscar adored me, though it had been years since I'd earned my agency, Femme, any serious money. The second call was from someone named Anthony Halliday, who identified himself as a private detective. Grace had taken two messages from him already. Having never spoken with a private detective before, I dialed his number out of curiosity. "Anthony Halliday's office." A wobbly, almost childish female voice. Not a professional, I thought; someone filling in. "He's not here right now," she told me. "Can I take a message?" I wasn't giving out Mary Cunningham's phone number, in part because she was a kind old woman, not my secretary, and because there was something perverse and incompatible in the notion of New York and its inhabitants storming the mausoleum of her house. "I'd rather call him," I said. "What'sa good time?" She hesitated. "There's no way he can call you?" "Look," I said. "If he wants to reach--" "He's, ah ... in the hospital," she said quickly. I laughed--my first real laugh since the accident. It made my throat ache. "Tell him that makes two of us," I cackled. "Too bad we're not in the same hospital, we could just meet in the hallway." She laughed uneasily."I think I wasn't supposed to say that, about the hospital." "There's no shame in hospitalization," I assured her heartily, "as long as it's not a mental hospital..." Excerpted from Look at Me: A Novel by Jennifer Egan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.