This collection of short stories written by Jennifer Egan reads very well after reading her award-winning novel “Visit from the Goon Squad”, as you can clearly see how certain motives and topics that were explored in the stories “fed” into the formation of the subsequently written novel. The literary bouquet of characters and the topics is really striking – I kept thinking how the author can write with equal authority about teenagers taking drugs and painting their graffiti marks on the walls of the city, self-made millionaires, investment market traders, women dealing with their husbands’ betrayals, women not able to recover from the past loves, and display such skills, perception and aptitude doing this. Another striking feature of these stories is that each story’s “cliffhanger” is positioned at various places of the story, which makes it exciting and anticipatory read. In a story titled “Sisters of the Moon”, the twist happens in the very first sentence (“Silas has a broken head”), whereas in the stories “Puerto Vallarta” and “Passing the Hat” such twists take place somewhere in the middle of the narrative. I just don’t know any other writer who can manipulate these twists’ shifts throughout the stories and keep readers’ attention at all times.And my final reflection on this collection. Most of the stories do not touch upon any exceptional characters or any extraordinary event in a character’s life and yet there is always an extraordinary feeling you are left with after reading each story, the effect I again attribute to Jennifer Egan’s great talent as a narrator and an artist, introspective analyst of human frailties, characters and idiosyncrasies.
This collection spans the early output of Jennifer Egan originally published from the late 80s to mid-90s, when the writer was just starting out. Given that the writer was still so young then, these stories are even more impressive because they possess an assured tone of voice and attention to detail, that at times (dare I say it?) reminds one of the terse style of the late cult short story maestro Raymond Carver. While Egan is most successful when getting under the skin of a cosmopolitan woman in stories like "The Stylist", "Passing the Hat" and the titular story about a fashion photographer and the doomed-to-fail model, she is equally adept at bringing to life the concerns of a middle-aged man confronting an old nemesis in a foreign and hostile locale in "Why China?". That story is striking because she creates such a strong picture of time and place that it seems to inform the protagonist's actions and lead him to risk his own life and his family's. Elsewhere in the collection, there are pubescent angsty girls walking the thin line ("Sacred Heart" and "Sisters of the Moon"), women confronting their marriages, failed, tired or both ("Letter to Josephine" and "Spanish Winter"), and children who cope with loss and betrayal ("One Piece" and "Puerto Vallarta").A sparkling and promising collection.
What do You think about Emerald City (2007)?
I'm a fan of Jennifer Egan. She's really good at character development and in a few short words you get an idea of what kind of person she's alluding to. Emerald City is composed of 11 short stories and while I enjoyed all of them, the first and last most resonated with me. The first is about a successful businessman who takes his family to China, supposedly on a vacation, but really to avoid the heat of an investigation into fraud. He runs across a man that grifted 25k from him years ago. The man doesn't recognize him and he starts following him around. They go around China, without him or the other man knowing why he's doing this and while he embroils his family in this mess he finds resolution with his own sins. The last story deals with a shy, 15 year old girl who does acid for the first time. Occurs in the 70s, in Manhattan, theirs some peer pressure from her friends, and she views the world differently at the end of the experience. My descriptions seem trite but Jennifer Egan is great in bringing a simple story to real life by enmeshing her sensibilities into her work.
—Alan Chen
With every book I read of Jennifer Egan's, I become a bigger and bigger fan. The one flaw that plagued some of her novels was clumsy plotting, but the short story form fits her style well and these masterful stories are beautifully rendered. Her keen eye for the glow of moments and how they resonate in our lives is at the center of each of these tales, and Egan draws much wisdom from the lives she observes here. Most poignantly, Egan hones in on economics in a way that most fiction writers shy away from, and this adds extra significance to these stories in the context of our current financial troubles. She is acutely aware of how money and the pursuit of it shapes the choices we make in relationships and careers, and is unafraid to show both the positive and negative ramifications of this on the lives of her characters. A must read for fans of her Pulitzer-Prize winning "A Visit from the Goon Squad."
—Steven
Meh. This is the kind of collection people call "promising". In this case, promising is code word for "frustrating" or "exceptional in unsustained bursts". Egan does so much well that it's hard to understand why nearly every one of these stories is flawed. Often, I just can't be brought to give a damn about the wicked-rich people in exotic locations that seem to dominate this collection, but even when she's nailing it, there's a wobble somewhere--an unnecessary eccentricity, a strained plot point, an over-weighted line of dialogue--that mars what has the potential to be a real gem of a story.So there ya go. Promising. Reading this, you can easily predict that she will one day do something remarkable, but you're also quite sure this is not it.Favorite story: "Puerto Vallarta"
—Chris
