I was first struck by the factual lavishness of Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me. She knows the names of every bit of jewelry in a rich provincial woman’s dresser, of skateboarding moves, of academic papers about industrialization, of the contents of a model’s purse.
But the real lesson to me as a writer is how she marinates those facts in her imagination.
A man who might be a terrorist–the foreign kind, not the bubbas who murdered in Oklahoma City–eats a Big Mac:
He couldn’t taste anything at first, could only think that it would never go down, he would choke to death on this gray sweetness, dry and sticky; he tried to swallow, his throat straining, seizing to push the clotted mass down its slender duct. Finally the lump evacuated his mouth with a tearing sensation, eased into his throat like a rat moving though a snake. He ate a French fry, breathing hard, sweat on his face, then shoved the second half of Big Mac into his mouth, loosening its airless compression with a slug of Coca Cola, his body braced for the surge of rage that would galvanize his dead insides when this affront reached them, an explosion that would shove it all back up. But nothing happened. He sat there nibbling French fries, watching light trucks big as houses slip past on Alpine, the Walther inert at his ankle, feeling the lump of food dissolve and become part of him, its cells mingling with his own cells, dividing to make new cells–the cells of a person who had eaten at McDonald’s. Then he crumpled the rest of his meal into the foil, a shiny McDonald’s wad, pushed it through the plastic slot of the garbage bin and stood beside it, unsure what to do next.
Compare that to the former adulterers who enter the same McDonald's a few pages later.
The one thing that bothers me–as a consumer, as someone who feels their half-articulated wants are the ultimate criterion of all worth–about Look at Me is what feels like Egan’s occasional lack of enthusiasm for her own characters. The prose sometimes reads like she snapped on latex gloves before sitting down to write. But she is also a poet of the dismal, the downside, the second thought, the qualification, the clinically honest report, the mug shot.
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