David Lurie
08-03-2010, 04:03 AM
This book is a technical tour de force: 13 chapters, 13 different voices and writing styles - including dystopia and a PowerPoint presentation, knowing and loving Jennifer Egan's work I was not surprised by these fireworks, the surprise was that I disliked the book.
I think the force behind Egan's work is lit theory: theory and the developed themes give structure to her books, that same structure she is mining with her narrative choices, in Look at me and in The Keep this work of building and destroying at the same time worked beautifully, the story was broken but ideas were giving the book coherence and a purpose, but not this time.
The 13 writing styles display Egan's talent and technique as a writer but are not functional to the story and in the long run they are boring, David Mitchell in Cloud Atlas displayed 6 voices and they were functional to the book and they helped the theory overlaying the novel too. The thirteen main characters are loosely connected - Selling the general's connection to the previous one is simply ridiculous, though the chapter is central to the themes of the book. What are these themes? dealing with our past (the book opens with a quote from Proust's Recherche) living in a "digitally enhanced" world and accepting the way the digital era has changed our lives, PR rules the world and democracy is a joke.
In the end, if you read the 13 chapters individually - and ignored the order chose by Egan - you could find out that they are good short stories (two of them had already been published as such) but as a whole they don't manage to form a bigger picture the way Elizabeth Strout achieved with Olive Kitteridge.
I think the force behind Egan's work is lit theory: theory and the developed themes give structure to her books, that same structure she is mining with her narrative choices, in Look at me and in The Keep this work of building and destroying at the same time worked beautifully, the story was broken but ideas were giving the book coherence and a purpose, but not this time.
The 13 writing styles display Egan's talent and technique as a writer but are not functional to the story and in the long run they are boring, David Mitchell in Cloud Atlas displayed 6 voices and they were functional to the book and they helped the theory overlaying the novel too. The thirteen main characters are loosely connected - Selling the general's connection to the previous one is simply ridiculous, though the chapter is central to the themes of the book. What are these themes? dealing with our past (the book opens with a quote from Proust's Recherche) living in a "digitally enhanced" world and accepting the way the digital era has changed our lives, PR rules the world and democracy is a joke.
In the end, if you read the 13 chapters individually - and ignored the order chose by Egan - you could find out that they are good short stories (two of them had already been published as such) but as a whole they don't manage to form a bigger picture the way Elizabeth Strout achieved with Olive Kitteridge.