Customer Reviews

Emerald City

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I love this writer, with her dry, terse voice that somehow tells all. As you read the stories, you can trust that something very real is going to happen; not something "fictional" or contrived, but an event such as could happen in real life. Not that the lives of her characters are like yours and mine; they all suffer from modern malaise of one kind or another; they all need love or else are so numb they don't know they don't have it.

One masterful story, "One Piece," chronicles an intense love needing to break out as a brother and sister strive for normalcy in an unimaginably beleaguered family. The pain of their circumstances would be unthinkable, but here we see decency, people trying to do the right thing, and then the extraordinary conclusion. This piece is uncharacteristically dramatic for Jennifer Egan, but it works beautifully and the story leaves you breathless.

Egan's language and her dialogue are reliably right. One the devices I like most about her is that she will tell the story in the present but will then fast-forward to the outcome years later. In her hands, this works perfectly: it's just what we want her to do.

It's tough to articulate why Jennifer Egan is my new favorite author -- I suppose she has edged out Ian McEwan, finally. This collection of short stories is a terrific way to get to know her as a writer. I've also really enjoyed "Look at Me" and "The Keep" from Egan, and look forward to "A Visit from the Goon Squad."

She is able to avoid clichés like hardly anyone else can, invoke emotional responses about the most unconventional concerns, make me smile and laugh at the strangest moments, and keep me turning pages.

Some would call her a postmodern writer, I'm sure, because of her constant pushing at the edges of convention. To me, she makes reading exciting again.

The title of my review pretty much says it all. These stories are/were a promising start for a super-talented writer. You can see right off the bat that Egan can write well: the descriptions, the dialogue--it all crackles with energy. I haven't read her novels, but reading this collection makes me want to pick them up, even if, in the end, most of them were just average.

This collection spans the early output of Jennifer Egan originally published from the late 80s to mid-90s, when the writer was just starting out. Given that the writer was still so young then, these stories are even more impressive because they possess an assured tone of voice and attention to detail, that at times (dare I say it?) reminds one of the terse style of the late cult short story maestro Raymond Carver.

While Egan is most successful when getting under the skin of a cosmopolitan woman in stories like "The Stylist", "Passing the Hat" and the titular story about a fashion photographer and the doomed-to-fail model, she is equally adept at bringing to life the concerns of a middle-aged man confronting an old nemesis in a foreign and hostile locale in "Why China?". That story is striking because she creates such a strong picture of time and place that it seems to inform the protagonist's actions and lead him to risk his own life and his family's.

Elsewhere in the collection, there are pubescent angsty girls walking the thin line ("Sacred Heart" and "Sisters of the Moon"), women confronting their marriages, failed, tired or both ("Letter to Josephine" and "Spanish Winter"), and children who cope with loss and betrayal ("One Piece" and "Puerto Vallarta").

A sparkling and promising collection.

Thefts and adultery are frequent themes in these stories about the rich and the beautiful, set in China, Chicago, Kenya, Mexico, Spain, Bora Bora, New York and San Francisco. The protagonists vary in age and sex but somehow always have the same quality of being bored and disappointed in their relationships. They do not seem to enjoy traveling; trust is always misplaced; wealth brings no satisfaction.

That makes the book sound depressing, but it's not. Humor comes from sharp observations of human foibles, the plots are strong and the stories are entertaining.

I just did not get this book, nor did I want too. I hated every story. My daughter and my niece read some of the stories just to see if they saw something in this book that I didn't, but they disliked it as much as I did. The stories were depressing and just strange. If Kindle eBooks had excerpts of their books I never would have bought this book.