A Nightmarish Take on America

Just how far will our cultural obsession with images and their consumption take us? Jennifer Egan’s Look At Me is a kind of fable for our times, examining the excesses of the present and positing a possible vision of the not-so-distant future. Her conclusion is dismal: At our current rate, the juggernaut of American mass culture will inexorably crush all that stands in its path.

In Look At Me, which was a finalist for this year’s National Book Award, strong sociopolitical commentary dominates an intricate literary framework. The novel weaves together the seemingly disparate stories of several complex characters: a second-rate model whose face has been completely reconstructed in the aftermath of a serious accident; an introspective teen distinguished by her utter lack of beauty; a history professor whose personal intellectual revelation has both ruined and redeemed his life; and a math teacher who has ruthlessly and repeatedly reinvented himself. The action of the novel unfolds in two very different sites—the fame, fortune and appearance-obsessed world of New York City and the suburban town of Rockford, Ill., an erstwhile paragon of industrialization—against the backdrop of contemporary American culture.

Egan’s first novel, The Invisible Circus (1995), received critical acclaim and was recently made into a film starring Cameron Diaz and Jordana Brewster. Look At Me, her second novel, is the product of more than five years of work. As a contributor to publications such as The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and Harper’s, Egan has written frequently on issues of image, identity and technology. Much of the research for these articles handily doubled as research for the novel.

The novel centers on the ambitious Charlotte Swenson, a model who will do almost anything to gain entrance into “the mirrored room,” a magical place whose inhabitants embody success and fame. Her failure to revive her modeling career leads her to alcoholism, a sort of selective amnesia and depression. Desperate to attain her dream, Charlotte signs on to a new commercial venture best described as the Internet version of “The Real World” or The Truman Show. As the project takes on a life of its own, nurtured by the public’s insatiable appetite for intimate, “real” knowledge of people, her story merges with that of the other characters, and all of their individual motivations and actions are overshadowed by the rapacious, corrupt force of American mass culture.

Look At Me explores the potential consequences of America’s insatiable image and information driven mass culture. What emerges is a lurid caricature of the 1990s: a “beautiful, starving Hutu refugee” models to satisfy the craze for “real” people; Charlotte’s saving grace is an Internet start-up which broadcasts, recounts and eventually rewrites the lives of representative Ordinary People (such as coal miners, fishermen, the homeless, addicts and farmers) and selected Extraordinary People (like herself) via the Internet; a terrorist is assimilated, one Big Mac at a time, into the American culture that he sought to infiltrate and destroy.

While the social commentary forms a significant part of the novel, Look At Me functions best as a purely literary work, thanks in large part to Egan’s remarkable narrative skill. Egan mixes flashbacks, stream of consciousness narratives and intellectual diatribes with careless ease to create a fitfully paced, engaging narrative that gradually builds in power. Her descriptions are precise and highly evocative. Charlotte details the reawakening of her memory: “The boredom and stasis of my present circumstances were driving me to retrospect in the desultory way that a person cooped up in an old house will eventually make her way to the attic and upend a few boxes.” Egan’s tone shifts, often humorously, to reflect the personality of the character on whose behalf she writes, as when Charlotte talks of New York nightclubs in which “mere unhappiness was about as welcome as an overweight cousin from New Jersey.”

Egan’s greatest achievement is the cast of characters she assembles, each of whom we come to know in painstaking, brutally honest and innovative detail, but whose actions and thoughts we can never quite predict. Egan presents her characters as is, indifferent to whether we like them, never purporting to explain them completely. We remain emotionally invested in characters who do despicable things.

For all the literary adroitness that the novel exhibits, Look At Me, or, more precisely, its message, is extremely hard to swallow. Egan is undeniably an incisive and perceptive commentator. Certain aspects of the novel seem eerily prescient; she conceived of the essentials of its plot in 1995. The supremacy of globalization, the rise of reality-TV, the rise of insidious terrorism: Look At Me contains them all. Yet her prognosis for America seems to be nightmarishly overdrawn and more seriously, fundamentally misanthropic. Though American culture may be plumbing new depths, it has not sunk to the level where “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?” and McDonalds can encapsulate its essence. Americans may consume superficial, spiritually empty products without exhibiting serious qualms, but that does not mean we are doomed to lose our ability to appreciate, connect to and dream of something better. Ironically, literary talent like Egan’s bolsters our faith that such a superior dimension exists in American culture.

look at me

by

Jennifer Egan

Doubleday

415 pp., $24.95