Sunday, April 10, 2005

Snap, Crackle, Lit

I spent most of last night and then most of this afternoon reading The Invisible Circus, which felt nice, like I was doing Jennifer Egan's work some justice, since I remember Look at Me taking me far too long to get through, not due to any lack of captivating qualities within that book, but due to me being a tool about reading at the time, hence this whole year and my unofficial taking up of the 50 book challenge, which, with the completion of The Invisible Circus, I'm now one-fifth of the way through, if I count correctly. That, my friends, was a long sentence.

I enjoyed Circus a lot, though I'm not sure it resonated for me quite as much as Look at Me did. And I feel bad reviewing a book by saying, "Yeah, it was good, but not good like the other book," but that's kind of how it is. The book was better than I thought it would be, though, if that makes sense; reading Egan's second novel first kind of left me wondering if I'd feel like I was reading a beta-version of her work by going back to her first novel, but that wasn't entirely the case. (Which is kind of why I've held off from reading Jonathan Franzen's first novel for so long, because after reading Strong Motion and then reading The Corrections and seeing the leaps-and-bounds improvements between the two, well, yeah, you can fill in the personally emotional blanks, there, I suspect.) I think comparing the two books does show her growing and strengthening as a writer--while showing certain concerns that lingered and/or intensified between the two books--so maybe comparisons aren't all invalid. Circus felt a bit more...smooth, somehow, maybe, please don't take this as gospel?; I guess in record-industry parlance you might say it felt a bit more slickly produced. Maybe. I don't know. I'm probably wrong.

I think what it comes down to is: Look at Me threw a bunch of elements at me that I didn't think I'd feel much interest in--a fashion model, a teenaged niece (again, me, with the books about teenaged girls, I swear I don't seek them out), the world of facade and appearance as being more important than what lies beneath--and somehow made it all seem or feel critical and vital to me, like the words reached up from the pages and grasped me by the throat and throttled me senseless until I needed to know more about the world Egan was constructing, and reflecting, since it really is a novel of our time. Circus didn't quite do that...but I'm still speaking of the book as lacking something and that's not what I mean to do.

What I mean to do is this: I mean to say that I really did like this book a lot, and that Egan's a writer I'll be looking forward to seeing more from in the future, and that's got to be pretty high praise, right? The Invisible Circus was a thoroughly satisfying quest/journey narrative with several moments of metaphorically jaw-dropping beauty--the sage advice given to the main character by a drug dealer in Amsterdam, right before everything in the room goes to hell, made for the kind of shocked contrast that left the book dangling in my hands for a minute before I could push forward; and the sparseness and tone of the opening chapter was just damned brilliant. Egan's got a book of short stories out there I'll read eventually, though I'll probably put it off for a while because I don't want to feel like I've run out of things of hers to read just yet.

So: "Yes, and if I knew how to do it that way, I probably wouldn't still be an unpublished hack."

Next up, for the something-completely-different book, I think I'm going to pick up The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus, because it's short and it looks deliciously strange, then I think I might tackle Cloud Atlas. Any teenaged girl type characters in either book, I will mentally replaced them with the Rice Krispies elves, because I don't want to come off like I'm some kind of weirdo.

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