Look At Me by Jennifer Egan

To what extent is image tied to identity? Would others see me as the same person were my image to change markedly? Would I? These are a few of the questions Jennifer Egan asks in her complex and ambitious novel, Look At Me. Chances are if you’ve heard of Egan, it is because of her 2011 Pulitzer winning novel, A Visit from the Good Squad; today I want to talk about her earlier 2002 novel Look At Me, which I see as even richer and more philosophically interesting than her prize winner, though both are superb. 

There are so many characters in this novel, each narrator of his or her story, that it’s almost difficult to pick a lead character. And yet certainly it is the model, Charlotte Swenson, who is the pivot point. The reader meets Charlotte shortly after she has been involved in a horrific auto accident, one in which she is pulled from the burning wreck by a good Samaritan, and then quite literally put back together. Her broken arm, leg, and ribs almost incidental to the reconstructive work on her face whose crushed bones are reassembled with eighty titanium screws and then another surgery a year later to fine-tune her broken face.

For reasons the reader will learn as s/he reads the book, the accident occurs close to Charlotte’s hometown of Rockford Illinois, where much of the subsequent action occurs, although Charlotte returns as quickly as she can to her New York apartment and hopefully to her life as a model. Apparently, the reconstructive surgery is remarkably successful in that she is still a beautiful woman, but she soon discovers that she is literally unrecognizable to the circle of models and agents whom she has lived amongst for well over a decade. 

…I’d postponed…reckoning with the world for the simple reason that I still didn’t know what I looked like. I’d spent as long as an hour staring through the ring of chalky light around my bathroom mirror; I’d held up old pictures of myself beside my reflection and tried to compare them. But my sole discovery was that in addition to not knowing what I looked like now, I had never known. The old pictures were no help; like all good pictures, they hid the truth. I had never kept a bad one—this was one of my cardinal rules, photographically speaking. One: never let someone take your picture until you’re ready, or the result will almost certainly be awful. Two: never keep bad pictures of yourself for any reason, sentimental or otherwise. Bad pictures reveal you in exactly the light you wish never to be seen, and not only will they be found, if you keep them, but invariably by the single person in the world you least want to see you that way.

The question of identity, of how we see ourselves and how we are seen by others, is crucial in this tale not only for Charlotte, the model, where image is everything, but for all of the other main characters as well. Moose, the older brother of Charlotte’s childhood friend Ellen, metamorphoses from an easygoing, dashing and sought after athlete in high school into a morose and enigmatic professor understood by none, and shunned by most because of his startling and unpredictable behavior. He wanders his hometown of Rockford seeing the future by studying the past of this one-time industrial hub reduced now to a kind of ghost of its former self. Muttering the phrase, “We are what we see,” and fascinated by the invention of clear glass in the 1300s, he searches for someone to whom he can pass on his insights, his foresight, his scorching epiphanies. “For Moose had sensed that a terrible reversal was in progress, a technological disaster whereby the genius of the Industrial Revolution would be turned on people themselves, whereby human beings would be assembled from parts just as guns and boots and bicycles had been once.”

Moose thinks perhaps his niece, Charlotte, almost certainly named after his sister’s childhood friend, is a candidate for carrying on his nearly unbearable prophesies. But it turns out that the sixteen year old Charlotte is attempting to find her own identity by starting up a sexual relationship with a much older man who is himself a shadowy figure whose identity is less certain, more plastic, than either of the Charlottes, or, for that matter, than anyone else he encounters. 

Add to the list of identity casualties an alcoholic private detective, cut loose from his past by events he refuses to disclose, and the cast of characters is almost complete.  Egan mixes in one more, a reporter who wants to interview Charlotte not because of an interest in fashion, but as an instance of a person whose appearance has changed drastically. 

I’m interested in the relationship between interior and exterior, how the world’s perception of women affect our perceptions of ourselves. A model whose appearance has changed drastically is a perfect vehicle, I think, for examining the relationship among image, perception and identity, because a model’s position as a purely physical object—a media object, if you will—is in a sense just a more exaggerated version of everyone’s position in a visually based, media-driven culture, and so watching a model renegotiate a drastic change in her image could prove a perfect lens…

What is personal identity? What is the truth, about the past, about the future, about ourselves? And who is discover and untangle it? 

There is so much in this book that I cannot in a short space even begin to lay out the issues, the mysteries, the questions. And to add a final element to the tangle, there is a character named simply Z who is adept in languages, changes identities as easily as changing a coat, and who remains always in the shadows. He has come to this country from somewhere, no one knows quite where, searching for the conspirators and for the plan of subjugation that allow America to rule the world. Finally in America, “standing in their midst, {he} felt the peculiar dizzying pleasure of hating a thing so purely you’ll do anything to destroy it, anything, a pleasure that was indistinguishable from the wish to be destroyed himself. Consumed.” 

A mystery, a tragedy, and in some remarkable ways a comedy as well—this is an excellent novel written in language that is as sharp-edged and contemporary as the world she describes. It is a fine example of my favorite sort of fiction, stories about us, here, now.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple

Sometimes a book can be hilariously funny, bitingly critical of contemporary society and businesses, and wholly unpredictable. Maria Semple’s 2012 novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, is all of these things and more. I have to admit that I picked up the book because of its cover, and because I was looking for something humorous. The first time I started reading it, I put it down quite quickly when I discovered that it consisted mostly of letters, memos, directives to employees and all manner of communications without, apparently, a central narrator or a plausible theme. I don’t usually care for novels that consist primarily of letters between the main characters. However, once I gave the book a chance and read into it fifty pages or so, I couldn’t put it down.

Turns out there is a central narrator; she is a middle school student named Bee Branch, and her mother, Bernadette, is a celebrated architect who no longer designs houses, or anything else for that matter. Her father, Elgie, is a computer whiz who has already built a computer company and sold it to Microsoft for a very handsome profit; he is also famous for a TED talk (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) and a member of a very elite team at Microsoft working on a hush-hush project that requires almost all of his time.

Bee is an only child who has already survived a number of heart surgeries as an infant and young child; she is a bristlingly bright girl who has achieved perfect grades in middle school and has requested as her reward a family trip to Antartica. Her parents have told her she could have anything she wanted if she graduated from middle school with straight As, and extraordinary youngster that she is, she has requested the trip to Antarctica. Unfortunately, her mother Bernadette is not only agoraphobic but also given to extreme seasickness, and her father finds it difficult to take a day off of work, let alone the weeks, even months, that the trip will require. And thus the plot thickens.

Because of Elgie’s position at Microsoft, the family has had to move from their home in California to Seattle; Bernadette has not only had to move from a home she is famous for having designed, but has been forced to move to a city she despises—a city she sees as full of ridiculously overzealous moms, overly polite drivers, and much too close to Idaho (not to mention Canada). The combination has brought her nearly to a nervous breakdown, and she has had to hire a virtual assistant in India to help her plan the trip to Antarctica and to deal with even the basic tasks of day to day living. 

After some bitter (and very funny) fights with neighbors and moms from her daughter’s school, and some serious problems that crop up with the alleged virtual assistant in India, Elgie thinks it appropriate to have his wife committed involuntarily to a mental institution, at which time Bernadette simply disappears. Hence the title, Where’d You Go, Bernadette.

The first annoying thing is when I ask Dad what he thinks happened to Mom, he always says, “What’s most important is for you to understand it’s not your fault.” You’ll notice that wasn’t even the question. When I press him, he says the second annoying thing, “The truth is complicated. There’s no way one person can ever know everything about another person.”  

Mom disappears into thin air two days before Christmas without telling me? Of course it’s complicated. Just because it’s complicated, just because you think you can’t ever know everything about another person, it doesn’t mean you can’t try.

It doesn’t mean I can’t try.

Don’t suppose that I’m giving away too much about this delightful book; what I’ve quoted above occurs on the first page, so the reader knows immediately that Bernadette will disappear, the only question is when, and what leads up to it. 

Bernadette calls the overzealous moms “gnats,” and she treats them with offhand contempt that she does not even try to hide from her daughter. Nor does she hide her opinion of the private school her daughter attends and its unceasing efforts to attract what a fundraiser calls “Mercedes Parents.” The fundraiser urges the parents to emancipate themselves from “Subaru Parent mentality”, and to aim at the $200K+ parents whose children are about to enter kindergarten. 

Besides the quite hilarious barbs directed towards snobby private schools, Semple also has plenty to say about Microsoft and the elitist mentality of its think-tank employees. If their work is not their purpose-in-life, their mission, they don’t last long.

Without telling you more about the twists and turns in the plot, I will mention Bee and her dad make it to Antarctica, which provides the reader some astute commentary on the very expensive guided tours and the companies that arrange them. 

All in all, the novel is full of surprises, totally unpredictable from page to page, and hilarious throughout. Semple is a wonderful writer. The brilliant, dyspeptic Bernadette and her  equally bright and candid daughter keep the reader both laughing and thinking! I’m not sure I could articulate what I learned from reading this novel, but I know that I enjoyed it, and I think you will too.

Me and Mr. Booker by Cory Taylor

The best way to introduce the author Cory Taylor is to let her lead character speak to us:

Everything I am about to tell you happened because I was waiting for it, or something like it. I didn’t know what exactly, but I had some idea. This was a while ago, after I decided that a girl is just a woman with no experience. I know what Mr. Booker would say on the topic of experience. He would say what you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts.

First of all there was the question of age. I was sixteen when I first met Mr. Booker, which can be young or old depending on the person. In my case it was old. I started to feel old when I was about ten, which was about the same time as my parents decided they had wasted their chances in life. I knew this because they told anyone who would listen, and this included me. I think disappointment was something I inherited from them both, along with their wavy hair and their table manners. In particular I think it was Victor who taught me at a young age how to lower my expectations.

These are the opening words of Martha, both the hero and the victim in Cory Taylor’s brilliant debut novel. The ‘debut novel’ label may mislead, for while this is her first novel, she is an accomplished screenwriter and author of short fiction, which manifests itself in the liquid smoothness of her first novel.  Her writing is so seamless that the reader forgets there is a writer behind the young narrator. From the first page to the last, I assumed I was listening to Martha, a sixteen year old Australian girl struggling to find her way in the hazy transition from childhood to being an adult. Martha is wise far beyond her years, yes, but also a hurt and searching child forced into the world of not simply witnessing, but counseling and adjudicating the ongoing wars between her parents.

One reviewer said this book was darkly comic, and while it certainly is comic, I see little or no darkness in it. A struggle yes; an uncommonly difficult coming of age, yes. It is hard enough just to be a successful child of  (more or less) separated  parents, but to be thrust into the role of counselor to her mother, and forced somehow to stand guard between her mother and Victor, her father, and sometimes between Victor and her younger brother—too much. She never calls him father, only Victor. Refusing even in name to deny essential separation.

She might have turned to Eddie, her younger brother at least as ally, someone to talk to about the craziness of their father, but “It was like he thought talking was kind of wasted effort that he didn’t see the need for because it didn’t lead anywhere.”

In fact, she turns to Mr. Booker, a stylish Englishmen and his beautiful wife, Mr. and Mrs. Booker. They need her as much (or more) than she needs them. Although they live in a fog of alcohol and frustrated dreams themselves. 

I’m not going to stress the sexual parts of this novel except to say that they are more comic than titillating. Although reviewers can’t help themselves from comparing the book to Lolita, and as perhaps a Lolita’s-eye-view of it all, it’s a silly comparison. The important and redeeming character in the book is Martha, who manages to escape not only from the sad, drunk Mr. Booker and his sad, lonely and isolated wife, but from Victor and even from her well meaning but ineffectual mother. Running to Sydney, perhaps with the help of one of her mother’s best friends, she regrets leaving her mother alone, and still not quite rid of Victor despite years of living more or less apart.  

Her mother wants to accompany her to Sydney, but Martha replies that she can manage on her own.  

She didn’t argue. She must have wanted to but I think she was scared that if she made it hard for me to get away from my father I would hold it against her for the rest of my life. My mother didn’t believe in confrontation. It wasn’t that she was weak, it was just that she didn’t see the point of it. She liked to tell me there were forces all around us that we couldn’t even see, and it was a question not so much of trusting them, but of accepting how helpless we were in the face of their power. Even so it must have been hard for her to watch me go; she probably thought she was losing me the same way she’s lost Eddie.

What counts most in this novel is not the sex, not even the tumult of the lives of the main characters, but the voice of the lead character. I, perhaps still naïve reader of fiction that I am, hear it as Cory Taylor’s voice. Looking back, yes, and with the wisdom that looking back affords, but expressing it always in the voice of that girl, of Martha. A strong and mostly lucid voice.

I read this book in a day or two because, cliché or not, I could not put it down. I loved it—the writing, the wit, the wisdom.