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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Jennifer Egan, author of "Look at Me," talks about her book's prescient depiction of a terrorist sleeper, the perversities of the fashion world and why male novelists get more credit for writing about big ideas.
Nov 14, 2001 | Jennifer Egan's latest novel, "Look at Me" (one of five finalists for the National Book Award for fiction, to be awarded Wednesday night), demonstrates that to those who were truly paying attention, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 could not have come as a complete surprise. Egan, who has published one other novel and a collection of short stories, has crafted a cool, jittery tale of a lonely teenage girl, a fashion model whose face must be reconstructed after a car accident, and the mysterious man who touches both their lives. The man turns out to be a terrorist "sleeper," an emissary from a dusty, rage-filled land intent on wreaking vengeance on America for the vast conspiracy he believes has destroyed and degraded his world. Few recent books have so eloquently demonstrated how often fiction, in its visionary form, speaks of truth. Egan dropped by Salon's offices recently to talk about "Look at Me."
You have a character in "Look at Me" who goes by the nickname Moose, a high school football hero turned kooky professor who's obsessed with the history of technology and capitalism, and with the doom he feels is coming as a result of both. He's someone who's teetering on the brink of insanity, but then again he's not entirely wrong. Do you see him as a prophet without honor in his own land, or as someone with a grain of truth who's just gone over the edge?
Both. He has an apocalyptic vision and feels that the world is going to end. In a sense, that is a feeling that I had a lot while working on this book. I can't really explain it. Maybe it was the sense of being buoyed up on the exalted fat times of the '90s and feeling that somehow it was going to come crashing down, I don't know. But I felt worried about a lot of things as I was working on the book and I think he became the repository of a lot of those worries. But I also raise a lot of legitimate questions about his vision. There's something so analogous about the history of the world to the history of his own personal situation that it's a little suspect. He's smart, he's on to something. At times I agree with him, but at times I think it's a little overdramatic. I think all those things at once.
Another of the characters in your book is a sleeper, a Middle Eastern man who comes to the U.S. with an antagonistic attitude toward American culture and some unclear but threatening plans. He assumes various false identities. Reading that, knowing that you'd written it before the recent terrorist attacks, was pretty spooky for me. It must have been very strange for you after Sept. 11.
"Look at Me" by Jennifer Egan
In this novel about the modern tyranny of image over substance, a fashion model's face is destroyed, then remade.
By Amy Reiter
It was very freaky. The strangest thing about it was that I researched that character, and what I learned was that the characteristic profile of a suicide bomber -- which is kind of how my guy starts out although he takes a different path -- is fairly naive, young, zealous, unsophisticated, without a lot of choices in their lives. It really wasn't satisfying to me to write about someone like that, nor could I imagine him having the trajectory that I wanted my guy to make in the book. So I decided to make my guy depart from that and I made him more middle-class, someone who comes to radicalism later in his life. He's sophisticated. What I found eeriest is that the ways that I departed from the suicide bomber model are also the ways that a lot of these Sept. 11 guys did.
