The Books, Journals, Poetry, & Film Base 120

Jennifer Egan has published four novels and one book of short stories in her writing career. That hasn’t made describing her writing any easier, but it is certainly good news for the fans she’s picked up along the way.Egan’s first novel was The Invisible Circus, published in December of 1994. On its surface, its plot seems like a recipe for melodramatic disasteran 18-year-old girl, haunted by her sister’s suicide ten years ago, travels to Europe to retrace her steps. Along the way, Egan reveals how the older sister’s life was informed by the father’s frustrations, and how the 1960s cast their bewitching shadow over all each event. The book doesn’t shy away from the character’s less proud but most realistic momentsfor instance, when the younger sister begins an affair with her dead sister’s lover. The Invisible Circus set Egan up as an author to watch, and was made into a film starring Jordana Brewster and Cameron Diaz.Before publishing her second novel, Egan released a collection of short stories called Emerald City. Again dealing mainly with female characters, the stories touch on the young (in one story of a schoolgirl) and old (in another tale centered a housewife). Time claimed the collection had an “affecting accuracyquiet but disturbing..She deftly depicts the ways in which women can create glamorously detailed personas for one another based on passing observations.”In her second full length work, Look at Me, the author integrated thriller elements into her emotional fiction, creating an impressive book that defies genres. A 35-year-old model named Charlotte loses her face in a car accident, and her entire livelihood along with it. As she attempts to adapt to her new life, a private investigator comes into the picture, hoping to track down a former acquaintance of Charlotte’s named Z. The story of another Charlotte (an old friend’s daughter) is intertwined with the first. As might be expected, issues of identity are par for the course here, but Egan pulls it off beautifully. Look at Me was a finalist for the National Book Award.In The Keep, Egan focuses on two mencousins who haven’t spoken in twenty years, when one of them left the other trapped in a cave for three days. The story starts when Danny, who made the tragic choice to run away so many years ago, is contacted by his cousin Howie, who is now an attractive millionaire. Howie invites Danny to help him renovate an old German castle, but that’s only the beginning of a horrific, almost Gothic tale. Egan described her intentions in this book as wanting to set the element of “nearly constant disembodied communicationa state traditionally associated with supernatural experience” alongside the similar effects produced by telecommunications.Egan’s most recent work is 2010′s A Visit from the Goon Squad. In this book, Egan once again returns to an age gone bythis time, the origins of punk rock in the Bay Area. The characters age and change over the course of over 40 years, but not always in the ways you might expect. In one engaging section, a character tells her story through a PowerPoint presentation, with the actual slides inserted into the novel. It’s another engaging and experimental work from the author, and one that will leave both old and new fans eager to see what else she has up her sleeve.