What little I read of the reviews for The Keep by Jennifer Egan focused on the more structural aspects of the book--the multi-level framed nature of the narrative; the melding and mixing of different genres (ghost story, gothic story, love story). All of which is (obviously?) interesting, but the book is (certainly?) about more than its form. What I think this book is more about is the unique and strange sadness of being a human being in a very modern society, a social framework that makes connectivity between people ubiquitous and easy and user-friendly. What happens when the ability to make those connections--in both or either a technological and inter-personal sense--is taken away or lost (either temporarily or, ahem, permanently), is what forms a basis for a specifically contemporary tragic condition.
In part, at least.
Or maybe not at all.
What's most important right now (in that post-final-page haze) is that The Keep is really a good book and I still love Jennifer Egan. A lot. I'll need to re-read Look At Me sometime soon before I make really grand claims but I think it's safe to say that though Ms. Egan has written three quite different (in terms of tone and subject matter and "genre") novels, there's enough evidence to support a claim that she's got concerns (such as the contemporary technological/sociological landscape); one might go so far as to bandy about such pretentious-sounding phrases as "as a writer, Jennifer Egan has continued to add to her overall project" (a slight variation of which ("The Jennifer Egan Project") is a band I would very much want to be a member of).
Again, in part, or at least, or not at all. This all sounds awfully smarty-pants mumbo-jumbo but her work sort of makes me want to actually write smarty-pants mumbo-jumbo about it because, dare I say it, her writing feels...important? Which is, I should make clear, not antonymous to "fun" or "enjoyable".
(Did I just use the word "antonymous"? Gads.)
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