There was a weird period of time in college where I decided self-disclosure was the way to go. I was heavily into angst at the time, mainlining The Smiths and Oscar Wilde and caught up in the notion that because I saw myself as different from my peers this was somehow worth advertising. Talking loudly and at length about feeling melancholy and unloved was a way for me to wreathe myself in superiority, to assert that even though I was a student at a largely white, fairly affluent Midwestern college, I was different from my peers. Better.What a self-involved little twerp I was.My thinking – or whatever passed for it as a 20-year-old dude – was that by revealing anything that I thought was worth knowing about myself (a fairly specious line of reasoning all by itself) I’d be projecting my true self, which would be irresistible to all the 20-year-old ladies who adored Michael Stipe and really appreciated honesty. I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but it was probably my version of Campbell Scott’s character in Singles, who hits on Kyra Sedgwick’s character by claiming he doesn’t have an act, and what she sees is what she gets. Her response, though, is the only truthful line in the scene: “I think that a) you have an act, and b) not having an act is your act.”“Honesty” was my act, and I put it in quotes here purposefully. My honesty wasn’t any more honest than anyone else’s. I was supposed to be soulful because I could recite Morrissey lyrics and deep because I openly admitted to reservoirs of self-loathing, as though that made me dashing instead of pathetic. But it was an affectation, a way of drawing attention to myself. I mean, not totally. I’ve wrestled with issues of anxiety and depression since at least junior high, but adopting “woe is me” as a lifestyle choice was just another way of wearing a Joy Division t-shirt without having to do the laundry.I couldn’t help but think of all this as I read Look at Me, Jennifer Egan’s powerhouse of a novel about several characters all wrestling with conceptions of identity, how much to reveal, and how to be appreciated for who they (think they) really are. It’s a dense, multi-layered text that reads as breezily as a beach mystery and a book that manages to say Real Things about 21st Century life without preaching. It initially seems to be centered on one character, Charlotte, a past-her-prime fashion model who suffers through a horrific car accident that destroys her face and then multiple reconstructive surgeries to rebuild it. She comes out the other side not looking like her old self – people she knows look right past her in restaurants and need to be re-introduced to her at parties – and while the book started promisingly, I wasn’t sure Egan could sustain my interest in Charlotte for 500+ pages.But then Egan begins to weave in threads from other characters, deftly connecting them in ways that were both unexpected and inevitable (but no less satisfying for it). In addition to Charlotte the Model (CTM), Egan takes up the question of personal identity in a variety of ways and with a range of characters (in both New York City, where CTM currently lives, and Rockford, IL, where she was born and raised) that never seems forced:• Charlotte – This second Charlotte is the 16-year-old daughter of CTM’s childhood best friend. Bookish and shy, she falls in love with a much older man as a reaction to her superficial friends and as a way of feeling important to someone worldly.• Moose – The uncle of Charlotte II, Moose is a disgraced Yale professor now teaching (and seeking redemption) at a college in Rockford. He begins holding private lessons with Charlotte II to help her see the world the way he sees it.• Michael West – A high school math teacher with a secret. To say more – other than the fact that it deals with the core of what it means to be American – would be to spoil one of the book’s great pleasures.• Anthony Halliday – An alcoholic private detective who begins a dalliance with CTM in the course of investigating the disappearance of Z., one of CTM’s New York friends.All five of these characters present a different way of unpacking the book’s title, and Egan probably could have given us a satisfying book just based on their lives. But she introduces more characters halfway through the novel and very nearly flirts with obsolescence in the process when she brings Thomas and his plan for a website that documents the lives of Real People™ into the mix.(Details of the site, for those who are interested: As Thomas describes it, it’ll launch with a handful of Ordinary People – the normal folks, like us – and a handful of Extraordinary People –models, actors, captains of industry – at its core. They’ll provide text-based journal entries where they relate the details of their day, but then eventually photos, music, streaming video, and filmed reenactments of key events from the person’s life will be incorporated into each individual page. The idea is to gradually expand the database and in the process bring the world closer together. From the site we learn about and develop empathy for the people whose lives we can now access 24 hours a day, and by extension we develop the same empathy for people like them we meet on a daily basis. It’s social media as altruism, before social media as we know it existed.)Keep in mind that Look at Me was written in 1999 (and published in 2001), pre-MySpace, pre-Facebook, pre-everything else we now know about the pervasiveness of social media. There’s the risk that Thomas’ site and his proposal to make CTM a cornerstone of this new venture will look quaint and archaic in our current culture. But somehow it doesn’t, which speaks to just how prescient Egan was, both in devising the concept for the site and for anticipating the still-thorny question of just how much we present of ourselves online is authentic and how much is fabricated for effect. Much of the second half of the book is focused on that question as Egan peels back the layers of each of the main characters, gradually revealing whatever lies at the core.As always, when I dwell too much on the details of plot I feel like I fail to sell the book’s quality. Put simply, Look at Me is a rich, resonant book, especially for anyone who’s wrestled with the question of who they really are and how they reconcile present with past – which, I imagine, is most of us. In the context of how I began this review – considering identity and how we choose to present it to the world – it perhaps makes the most sense to close with the passage that hit closest to home and which speaks most profoundly to how I think of myself now in relation to the person I was. I might not be the 20-year-old drip I used to be, but when I think in terms of what people expected of me when I was younger, I feel like I’ve got a long way to go. And the clock is ticking."When Moose imagined himself as a child, he pictured a boy watching him across a doorway, through a screen, and a bubble of sorrow would break in his chest, as if he were seeing someone who had died or vanished inexplicably, a milk carton child, as if some vital connection between himself and that boy had been lost. And despite all that Moose knew he was achieving now or trying to achieve, still he felt – inexplicably – that he had failed to fulfill the promise of that little boy, and was being visited by his unhappy ghost."Read all my reviews at goldstarforrobotboy.net
yay! friends read books togeeeether! and now i can finally link our reviews!http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...i wish i had read this when it first came out. and i am mad at myself for not loving this book as much as everyone else seems to have - when i read other reviews of it, i am jealous that it didn't grip me as much as it did others, as much as her other books have gripped me. there are definite strengths here. she demonstrates an uncanny and impressive cultural prescience; the way william gibson predicted the internet, she imagines social networks and reality t.v. before myspace, before facebook. and this book, published only a week after 9/11, has some eerie EERIE terrorist situations and general "america is corrupting and must be brought to its knees" sentiment flooding through it. and that prescience, like the trailer for this movie whose coolest part is now probably going to have to be cut because of horrific events makes the reader uncomfortable, knowing what we now know. but for me, the multiplicity of storylines, while (mostly) individually fascinating, never really came together. i mean, in the most superficial way they did, as characters' lives intersect unexpectedly, but thematically, there didn't seem to be enough connective tissue. obviously image, perception, "we are who we say we are" certainly does recur, but i was hoping for the moment that makes the multiple narratives necessary, and it just never happened. when you have as many characters and viewpoints as you do here, some first-person, some third-person, closure becomes a little tricky, and i think some characters did not reach a satisfying resolution. for example, moose, in his final scene. i don't know how to read it.he seems to see it as a triumph, as a hopefulness, but he is subject to the same veiled perception as all of the characters in the book, perhaps more so, and it remains unclear. and charlotte's (model-charlotte's) pre-epilogue final scene is almost exactly like infinite jest, where we are left to fill in the gaps of "how did we get to here from there?" and i'm not sure i understand why ricky was given a discrete narrative, except that it gave her a chance to show off her storytelling skills. as a whole, it never really came together for me, although i liked so many individual parts so much that i feel a little sad only giving out three stars.the parts that are good are very very good. if i may:Even as a child, riding home with my mother and Grace after a Saturday in Chicago, new dresses and Frango mints from Marshall Field's packed carefully in our trunk, lunch at the Walnut Room still alive in our minds - even then, when the drive between Rockford and Chicago had encompassed the entire trajectory of my known world, arriving at State Street's outer reaches, at that point practically rural, had roused in me not the lilt of home but a flat dead drone inside my head. Even then, I experienced my return to Rockford as a submersion, a forfeiture of the oxygen of life. And with every subsequent return there had been a flattening, an incursion of dreariness, as I remembered what I had come from and faced it again.tExcept now. Today, a silly joy flopped at my heart as I drove past the Clocktower Hotel with its "Museum of Time," past the "Welcome to Rockford" sign, past the Courtyard Inn, the Holiday Inn, the Bombay Bicycle Club, Buger King, Country Kitchen, Red Roof Inn, Gerry's pizza, Mobil, Century 21, Merril Lynch, Lowe's Gardening and Home Depot. I felt proud of Rockford for appearing on cue and playng its part with such conviction. I had told Irene it would be blighted, bloated, vacant, and now Rockford heaped upon us a quintessentially awful American landscape, the sort of vista that left Europeans ashen-faced: flat, hangar-sized windowless buildings; a swarm of garish plastic signs; miles of parking lot crammed with big American cars throwing jabs of sunlight off their fenders and hubcaps. It was a land without people, save for a few insect-sized humans sprinkled among the parking lots like stand-ins from an architectural scale model, humans diminished to quasi-nonexistence by the gargantuan buildings and giant midwestern sky, pale blue, dotted with tufts of cloud, vast and domineering as skies in Africa.a triumphant homecoming it is not. but it is a recognizable one, and everything is so descriptively razor-sharp it makes me ache. i loved great chunks of this book. and again, i wish i had read this when it first came out.but let's see what greg has to say.
What do You think about Look At Me (2002)?
I couldn't wait to finish this book. I just wanted it to end with every turn of the page. Despite the book turning into a perpetual monkey on my back, I was resolute on not giving up on it. It's just not in my genetic make-up to give up and be defeated, even by a densely crap book. Despite the pain, I wanted to keep on reading, not because I wanted to discover what happened, but because I have this 'thing' about half-finished projects, or anything in life, really, and this also goes for books. Just like my morning exercise sessions, no matter the amount of pain, I was determined to get through it.So what's so bad about this novel that makes me equate it to gruelling bootcamp sessions? Well, firstly, the entire narrative is simply a laborious stream of descriptive brouhaha. There are several key characters, and although we get a detailed glimpse into their psyche and lives, nothing seems to actually HAPPEN to them. The plot is soporifically slow and even though you constantly wait (very patiently!) for something to happen, it never does, just like a bad B-grade movie. I found that whenever I picked up the novel from where I left off, I had NO idea what had previously occurred, so I had to turn back and skim over a couple of past pages just to get the gist of what was going on. Taking out my bookmark and picking up from where I'd finished felt like a monotonous chore. I willed for a bonfire to be lit, just so I could aim the book right into it. Surprisingly, when there was a sudden squirt of action, I found I had NO empathy for the character/s, feeling nothing but indifference towards them. It's rare that I read a book and feel soulless as a result. With 'Look at Me' I didn't feel anything at all - only relief that I had turned another page and was that much closer to the end.Overall, this novel is 514 pages of self-indulgent artistic sculpturing. The only thing going for the pretentious prose (and to which I give kudos for) is that it is extremely articulate. But well-written? Well, it certainly didn't grab, nor sustain, my immediate attention, and the characters were woefully wooden and two-dimensional, so I would have to say no.
—Tiffany Vaughan
This book reminded me a bit of Fight Club. They both center on a nostalgia for unmediated experience in a corporate, marketing-saturated age, and feature fractured identities, people divided against themselves. But while it has its own fantastical and grotesque elements, Look at Me seems grounded in a more fully-realized America with a wider cast of characters. Both Charlottes, the confused adolescent and the confused failing model no longer in arrested development, develop in fascinating ways. And while everyone leading a life that is envied turns out to be living in unenviable ways, they're all represented generously and sympathetically.
—Peter
I didn't want to like Jennifer Egan; I wanted to love her. I wanted her to be my new favorite writer, but due to some profound personal failing, I can't stand her books, which does pose something of a challenge there. I really don't know what's wrong with me and why I can't love this book like everyone else (i.e., Mike Reynolds); it has something to do with feeling really unimpressed by her prose, and by this feeling that nothing about her writing ever surprises me. I remember this from when I tried to read A Visit from the Goon Squad; there's something dampeningly familiar and unthrilling about it for me, like making out with an old friend.Obviously this must be my problem and not Jennifer Egan's, since all good people of quality and taste (i.e. Mike Reynolds) agree that she is the greatest. I could keep reading this -- it's not hurting me -- but I'm about to go out of town and it's due back to the library. Also, why read something I don't enjoy, especially when not enjoying it makes me feel terrible about myself?
—Jessica
