1. The structure is the most unusual thing she does here. At all levels, the lens given to the reader looks like milk stirred into coffee. There are these eddies and whirls of time and characters apparent throughout.
—At the macro level, each chapter exists alone, as a short story; yet each contains characters that cross-pollinate the other stories. Most of these stories exist in different time periods—from the 1970s and 1980s to maybe the late 2020s. Egan’s non-chronological arrangement of the text means that at one level, the stories disconnect themselves from each other through being disconnected in time. To aid this tactic, Egan excludes main and supporting characters consistent through every single story, but allows enough cross-pollination that the time jumps drive the disconnection home. So, in general, her whirling tactic works at the macro level though I imagine it would be hard to pick this book up again in the middle, after a couple weeks break from reading it—I would be asking myself, "who is Jules again?" But I wonder why she arranged the chapters the way she did. Is there a thematic or philosophical argument being laid out by this sequence of reading? If so, I think I missed it. Though she does seem to back-end the the book with some of the most poignant stories (Basically, Selling the General through the end, except Goodbye My Love).
—At the micro level, each short story also includes moments outside the narrative, asides that explore the timeline of this or that character. For instance, an unnamed African musician playing music to the safari tourists:
“The warrior smiles at Charlie. He’s nineteen, only five years older than she is, and has lived away from his village since he was ten. But he’s sung for enough American tourists to recognize that in her world, Charlie is a child. Thirty-five years from now, in 2008, this warrior will be caught in the tribal violence between the Kikuyu and the Luo and will die in a fire. He’ll have had four wives and sixty-three grandchildren by then, one of whom, a boy named Joe, will inherit his lalema: the iron hunting dagger in a leather scabbard now hanging at his side. Joe will go to college at Columbia and study engineering, becoming an expert in visual robotic technology that detects the slightest hint of irregular movement (the legacy of a childhood spent scanning the grass for lions). He’ll marry an American named Lulu and remain in New York, where he’ll invent a scanning device that becomes standard issue for crowd security. He and Lulu will buy a loft in Tribeca, where his grandfather’s hunting dagger will be displayed inside a cube of Plexiglas, directly under a skylight.”The text promptly forgets this musician. His grandson, Joe, comes back up later, but only in passing. Essentially, this diagram of two lives spun out of the story gives evidence of Egan’s overall tactic in a single paragraph. Her descriptions echo this specific, micro application: at times she spins off into glimpses into the future or the past instead of establishing physical appearances through pseudo-blazon. Does it work? This micro application toes a dangerous line of humor that wouldn’t fit into the feel of the novel, while stepping carefully between over-foreshadowing and being uninformingly tangential. I don’t believe she succeeds in every situation. To subvert a quote from the book, at times it feels like “we’re getting off the subject.” At the same time, I’m bored of blazon-like descriptions serving to set up all characters, and I appreciate her efforts here. (Also, my wife’s comments here were simply that she hates it when authors do these glimpses into characters' pasts or futures, but she doesn’t hate it when Jennifer Egan does it.)
—So, an ensemble novel composed of interlaced short stories arranged non-chronologically. I’m not sure this book would convince anybody new to the concept that a novel of related short stories is worthwhile, but it is a treat for this fan of these types of books (Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie, Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson). The trick with these books is that each story needs the strength to stand alone. I find four at least that look weak.
1. A to B seems a sort of connecting story more than its own thing—Forty Minute Lunch would’ve been odd to include without A to B.So, not every single story works as well as the others, relying on interconnection to pull these four along: in other words, I was only interested in these four stories because of their effect on the others. Whereas a largely unconnected story, Great Rock and Roll Pauses by Alison Blake, is one of the more poignant moments in the book, but its strength as a stand-alone short story overshadows how it plays into the rest of the novel.
2. Goodbye, My Love looks tangential in that I understood more about Sasha in Naples from Out of Body.
3. Ask Me if I Care sets up more than it interests in its own right.
4. X’s and O’s serves the other stories rather than taking control of its own destiny. (Although this is one of my wife’s favorites, so maybe I missed something there.)
The elderly bird-watching ladies trade a sad smile. Lou is one of those men whose restless charm has generated a contrail of personal upheaval that is practically visible behind him.
2. The writing itself works wonderfully. From that perfectly tone-setting first sentence, “It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel,” through “Time’s a goon”, some fantastic phrases exist in this book.
“How could so much devastation have been silenced?”These words are a joy to read.
“Life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape.”
“Suicide is a weapon; that we all know. But what about an art?”
—She shifts between perspectives in stories: first, second, and third person perspectives are all used, and I’m not sure why. A lot of complaints I read about this novel talk about how every post-modern writing trope presents itself here. It’s a fair complaint—people not interested in writing could easily skip this novel. Not all her tactics work as brilliantly as her short, declarative sentences, and her listing sentences. But at least the perspective shifts do help increase the disconnect between the stories and characters. Other than that though, I’m not sure why they’re there.
—My wife’s thoughts about the writing were, “Who wrote this book? Yeah, she’s a good writer.”
Structural Dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.
3. However, the writing itself is not the point. Optimistically, the question with these interconnected short story books is whether the characters are deep and complex enough to carry the whole as a novel. Pessimistically, these books function as garbage bins where all the writer’s characters, the ones cut from other works, the half-conceived ones, they gather to let a number of exciting plots carry them along.
—Egan’s characters typically wrinkle themselves through competing desires. Tom desires his wife, but he also fears the power she has over him, so he shuts her out of his life slowly over time. The tragic tale of Rob and Sasha affected me. Bennie puts gold flakes into his coffee to increase his physical sexual potency, but he’s conflicted:
“The world was unquestionably a more peaceful place without the half hard-on that had been his constant companion since the age of thirteen, but did Bennie want to live in such a world?”In other words, he’s obsessed with sex, mentally, but can’t get it up and is kind of thankful he can’t.
—The flipside of this would be what critics complain about: many of these characters are wrinkled in cliche ways. Whether I believe these cliches exist in life may put down this critique, but the characters don’t all interest me as much as some do. Sasha’s interest lies more in her effect on others than in herself. Drew holds my attention less than Rob. Lou bores me, as does Bosco and Kitty and some of these other celebrity cliches. Jules overshadows his sister Stephanie by far. I have read Stephanie before. I’ve read her written well. Does Egan add anything to the "Stephanie" discussion? No, not really. But does she need to? No, because she uses Stephanie mainly as the foil to illuminate Jules, who is interesting. So, for two reasons I’m not terribly upset by how much these characters seem familiar from fiction: first because these cliches are common to life, second because Egan usually applies the boring ones usefully. But I still wish some of these characters were more interesting.
“I don’t get it, Jules,” Stephanie said. “I don’t get what happened to you.”
Jules stared at the glittering skyline of Lower Manhattan without recognition. “I’m like America,” he said.
Stephanie swung around to look at him, unnerved. “What are you talking about?” she said. “Are you off your meds?”
“Our hands are dirty,” Jules said.
4. The book’s themes speak to longing, desire, mistakes, and interpersonal perspectives—more so than interpersonal relationships. That distinction between interpersonal perspectives and interpersonal relationships is founded on the longings, desires, and mistakes of the characters, keeping a tight, consistent theme throughout. Yes, Egan touches on suicide, sexual violence, lust, love, death, childhood, loss of innocence, aging, war, and most of the other major writing themes, but the book focuses on that perspective-relationship distinction.
—Clearly, Egan states that relationships are better than perspectives. Lou has a perspective on all women and how they relate to him, and this keeps him from forming any meaningful relationships. Jules' frustrated search for a relationship leads to rationalizing sexual violence. Sasha’s potentially happy relationship with Rob is ruined by her perspective of her father and Rob becomes yet another missed opportunity for her. But Egan also uses positive examples to reinforce her value judgment. Lulu and Joe are shown as good characters full of promise, and they have what appears to be a solid relationship. Drew and Allison form a deep bond and their tale ends on a positive note, despite the world turning bad around them. When Stephanie gets past her perspective of her tennis partner, she finds an unexpectedly rewarding relationship. I found this distinction between perspective and relationship to be the main theme here—reinforced heavily by the last story in the book.
You make a clumsy leap, your body crashing onto the water, your knee hitting something hard under the surface. The cold locks in around you, knocking out your breath. You swim crazily to get away from the garbage, which you picture underneath, rusty hooks and claws reaching up to slash your genitals and feet. Your knee aches from whatever it hit.
5. In closing, the potential for a pretentious book exists here. But Egan pulls a lot of it off. I’m not watering at the mouth until I buy my next Egan book, but her writing is above average in quality, her characters are mostly used to their strengths, and the structure intrigues me.
Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out. And I, like a scientist unwittingly inhaling toxic fumes from the beaker I was boiling in my lab, had, through sheer physical proximity, been infected by that same delusion and in my drugged state had come to believe I was Excluded: condemned to stand shivering outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street forever and always, imagining the splendors within.
