Jennifer Egan - Look at Me

So, I turned back to Egan as promised in order to determine whether she really does hold a place as one of my favourite female writers, whether A Visit from the Goon Squad was her literary highlight, whether her voice in more traditional story-telling mode is as magnetic.

Look at Me is a hugely ambitious book. It is beautifully written and plot-driven, but it also acts as an in-depth exploration of larger themes and philosophical questions, particularly over the nature of identity, and the modern prioritisation of image at the expense of authenticity.

Egan took six years to write this book and it shows; it is populated with a large cast of characters, each taking turns in the narrative spotlight, and each illustrating Egan's theme from a new perspective.

Really, though, this is a tale of two Charlottes.

Charlotte Swenson is a 35 year-old model whose face has been wrecked in a car accident and whose reconstructive surgery leaves her with a face so different from her old one that nobody recognises her. Charlotte is an enigma. She is consumed by the desire to succeed in the public eye, to enter what she calls "The Mirrored Room", that elite space reserved for those in our modern society who have obtained a glorified celebrity status - the rich and famous, the beautiful. Her ticket in, before the accident, was her beauty, her face. Although she never made it to the realm of true, stratospheric stardom, she was close enough to be considered 'one of the beauties' on a circuit of wealthy hotspots around the world and in the exclusive nightclubs of New York City. But there is a deeper side to Charlotte, revealed in her ability to glimpse people's 'shadow selves' - their true selves, their real identity, which most people take great pains to hide from the world in favour of what they want the world to see. After her accident Charlotte also starts seeing the 'shadow self' of Manhattan - old signs, hidden behind modern buildings, still plastered on old brick walls, representing a bygone era. Interestingly, these glimpses of the past soothe Charlotte, who otherwise seems so preoccupied by flashy facades.

After realising that her new face means she will never succeed again at modelling, Charlotte finds a new way to sell her soul - to a dot com start-up. Extra/Ordinary commoditises lives on the internet, in an attempt to capture reality and expose it for the masses to see. Inevitably, the 'life' represented online is a departure from reality rather than its essence - it is manufactured, with the manufacturing done by other people: ghost writers, film directors, 'experts'. Even as she achieves the kind of success that she has always dreamed of, Charlotte becomes deeply uncomfortable with the artifice of her manufactured life. She has sold her soul to gain entry to the mirrored room, which she ultimately recognises for what it is: an arbitrary space filled with empty, superficial people, "chimeras... the hard, beautiful seashells left behind long after the living creatures within have struggled free and swum away". She finally realises this is not what she wants, after all, and it thus becomes clear that the loss of Charlotte's face in fact marked the start of her painful journey towards authenticity.

Charlotte Swenson's life is played out against the life of another Charlotte, a high school girl who lives in model-Charlotte's hometown. Young Charlotte suffers at school because of her plain looks and her initial unwillingness to play the games that characterise some of the more shallow social interactions between teenagers. She is a strong young woman with a fierce sense of her own independence and self-worth, traits which have no doubt been developed in response to her younger brother's struggle with leukaemia and her parents' understandable preoccupation with their son's well-being. As she distances herself from her cliquey school and her popular friends, young Charlotte finds herself increasingly drawn to two men. One is her uncle, Moose, who battles against a madness caused by an epiphany he had years earlier, in which he recognised the past as ever-present behind the superficial trappings of modern day America - much as model-Charlotte sees the shadow-self of New York City behind its new facade. Moose's x-ray vision, however, has led him to believe that the modern structures of current-day society, which hide beneath them the true history of America, spell the doom of humanity. He is frustrated by his inability to relay this vital doomsday message to anybody else and hopes that young Charlotte might be his protege, teaching her obsessively about the history of their small town in the hope that her own epiphany lies around the corner.

The other man in young Charlotte's life is a mysterious maths teacher called Michael West, who is not from the West at all, but who arrived in America from somewhere far East with the intent of destroying America, or some part of it. Michael West believes, upon arriving in the States, that the intoxicating images that are exported from the USA to the world, of beautiful women in night clubs and tall buildings made of steel and glass, and the global dissemination of these artifices through ubiquitous fast food and Hollywood movies, are signs of an American conspiracy to take over the world through eroding the authenticity and cultural reality of other places. It is not until he arrives in America that he is gradually lulled into the peaceful acceptance that there is no conspiracy. Americans themselves, he realises, believe in the images they project, and they are too drugged by the artifice to recognise the danger these represent to the rest of the world.

A South African friend of mine once said that the secret to world peace was a backyard and a two car garage - that once people were relatively happy with their lot in life they were far less likely to go and fight wars. Michael West's desire to destroy America dissolves as he gradually absorbs the American life, even going so far as to adopt a layer of fat over his taut physique from ingesting McDonald's, that iconic symbol of American imperialism. He comes to realise that he can be a part of the image he had previously so despised, and that this is a much easier way to live than maintaining his struggle against the artifice and a rage so intense it has caused him to walk out on marriage after marriage, life after life.

Young Charlotte, fighting against the perceived importance of beauty that is the reality at American high schools, feels a kindred tie to both of these men, but does not consciously recognise why she is drawn to them. She is looking for something but cannot explain even to herself what that is.When her own beauty gradually emerges - through the artifice, of course, of well-applied make-up and (like Clark Kent into Superman) the removal of her glasses - she finds the complications of trying to live like her Uncle, or emulating the secrecy and just-suppressed rage of Michael West, too difficult. What she most wants, after all, is what all high school students ultimately want: to fit in, even if that is at the expense of their true selves.

In direct contrast to model-Charlotte, she moves from determinedly gripping onto reality and actively pursuing authenticity, to embracing shallow artifice.  Like Charlotte, though, the vehicle for her transformation is her face, in this case the adoption of a false one which allows her to sink easily into the contrived homogeneity of a high school crowd.

The various storylines of this book eventually collide and we are left with a scathing view of modern society, and a dire prediction for the near future, a future which has, to a large extent, already come to pass since the publication of the book in 2001. With the advent of Facebook, the rise and growth of reality TV, the obsession with sharing our lives with the world through Twitter, Instagram and so on - much of what Egan seems to be warning against in Look at Me has already happened. I wonder whether she now feels that it is too late for the world.

Overall assessment: 4 out of 5. I really enjoyed this book, but somehow it hasn't touched me as deeply as I think it should, given the subject matter. One reason for this may be the ending, which for me didn't quite come together with the emotional impact it could have, or should have. The project may have been overly ambitious. Many clever parallels are drawn between the two Charlottes that don't quite add up - model-Charlotte's obsession with 'Z' and young-Charlotte's obsession with Michael West, for example, mark a mid-point in both of their journeys where they were in the same place, emotionally, though moving in opposite directions on their journeys to/from authenticity. But this doesn't hit home for readers in any significant sense because the story is too big.

Pros / favourite part(s): Egan's writing is beautiful; I highlighted large sections of text simply to remind myself later how extraordinarily apt were her metaphors, how unusual her capacity to describe ordinary things in a way that made them somehow extraordinary. Her writing reminds me in some ways of Jonathan Franzen's, or perhaps it is the other way around - they certainly share some similarities. Her story-telling is for the most part gripping, and reminds me in places of Anne Patchett's. It is safe to say that Egan does now hold a position in my library as one of my favourite female writers.

There were scenes in this book that gave me chills. For example, soon after returning to New York post-accident, model-Charlotte thinks she still has a chance to succeed in the modelling industry when she is offered a photo shoot with Italian Vogue.  Paparazzo turned fashion photographer Spiro is at the helm, having become an instant sensation after a shoot replicating gang violence, which has spawned a trend in fashion photography for photographing 'real' people 'from the news', rather than mere models. All seems to be going well until the make-up artist takes out a razor blade and it becomes clear that, in this shoot, authenticity is to be won through actually cutting the models and recording their fresh blood. Charlotte, with her fragile, newly recovered face, a face put back together with 80 titanium screws, refuses to go through with it - only to be told that she 'doesn't get it', she's not real enough. She is replaced on set by a real refugee of North Korea, a girl so empty of power that she cries silently as the razor blade slides across her cheek.

As Egan writes towards the end of the book, reality, or truth, is something that burrows further inside a dark, coiled privacy when the light of publicity is shone on it - "it dies the instant it is touched by light" because "life can't be sustained under the pressure of so many eyes". Moments like these were deeply touching.

Cons: The ending is disappointing. I feel as though Egan had wanted to write a climax in which all of the strands of her story came together powerfully, in one momentous scene (like the ending of John Irving's A Prayer from Owen Meany, one of my favourite books), but it didn't quite work. For one thing, the life of model-Charlotte somewhat outshone that of young Charlotte, and so it was difficult to see them or treat them as two sides of a coin, which I think they were meant to be. Young Charlotte's transformation did not seem nearly as meaningful as the transformation of model-Charlotte, which was perhaps a result of the fact that Moose and Michael West to some extent took over as minor protagonists of their own in her story.

I still finished the book feeling it had been a very good read, and a fascinating one at that - but I was also left thinking that at the time of publication, Egan's potential as a story-teller was yet to reach its zenith. Perhaps the Pulitzer-prize winning A Visit from the Goon Squad is that zenith, or perhaps it is still to come. I hope for the latter.

Note: Egan suffered upon release of this book because it came a few short months after 9/11, though she had finished the writing of it well before that tragedy. The terrorist character of 'Z' in this book is therefore sometimes seen as outdated, and she has written a note at the end of the book to explain the reason for this. For my part, I wasn't irked by my awareness of intervening events in America, although it does date the book. American readers might feel differently.