Customer Reviews

Look at Me

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

This novel far and away exceeded my expectations. I liked the idea of a novel about a person learning to live with a new face. I expected something quiet and thoughtful like Elizabeth Berg or Anne Tyler. "Look At Me" was a lot more than that, while still keeping the emotional appeal of those authors' books. At the beginning of the book, Charlotte, a model at the end of her career and going down, is in a horrible car accident. As she begins her recuperation, her path crosses with her former best friend's daughter, also named Charlotte. For most of the book, the two Charlottes' stories mirror each other. As one Charlotte learns to live her life over again, the younger Charlotte is discovering life and love for the first time. Both are dealing with issues related to their looks and esteem..."old" Charlotte has a new face that is slightly different than before, and young Charlotte must deal with her average looks and an unfair reputation as an easy girl. Each has a man in her life who is not what he seems. The mystery that ties them together is unexpected and really suspenseful. I was up until early in the morning reading "Look At Me", and was practically foaming at the mouth by the time I reached the climactic scene where everything was explained. Egan's prose is beautiful and literate, but without the denseness that made "The Invisible Circus" a slow-going read at the beginning. "Look At Me" zips along without abandoning intelligent thought and without taking the obvious turns so prevalent in mainstream fiction. Take a chance on this book...you'll love it!

I would hate to be Jennifer Egan at the start of writing her third novel, because her second novel, Look at Me, will be a tough act to follow. Beautifully written and crafted, with a fugue-like structure, Egan shows how individual lives collide with history in unpredictable ways. Her main character, Charlotte Swenson, is a model from the mid-west who has her face surgically reconstructed after a devastating car accident that takes place during a visit to her despised home town. Charlotte's desperate but cynical repositioning of herself within New York's fashion world draws an incisive portrait of the workings of celebrity culture. Charlotte decides to sell her identity to a new web site, in the course of her personal re-launch. Similarly, a mysteriously missing acquaintance of Charlotte's discard his old identity, and creates himself anew in Charlotte's home town. Egan skillfully links this fluidity of identity with values underlying the larger popular culture, and makes credible the kind of passionate ideological response to popular culture that leads to terrible acts of violence. Like I said, prescient.

As other reviewers have noted, the premise for this book will draw you in. As I read it, however, I kept asking myself, Why is this has-been model's story all that exceptional since it sounds like her career was over anyway? This Internet venture is not believable! What was the point of the Anthony Halliday and Irene Maitlock characters-who get quite a bit of page time? Why even write about Ricky's cancer and his experience with the older skate kids? Why bother with Pluto the homeless man? These characters are all interesting, but in the end seem just a distracting tangent from the main story. I was waiting patiently for something to come together up until the last page of the book. As the stories seemed to want to converge, their connections were left undiscovered and the story seemed unfinished. terrible. I was disappointed.

This book is incredibly eerie, especially in light of recent events. I'm almost convinced that anyone wanting to understand the events of Sept. 11 should read this book, because it gives an insight into the mind of (albeit fictional) terrorist, and provides a plausible explanation as to why other parts of the world hate us so much.
Even without that aspect though, this is still a fascinating book. It explores the idea of identity in so many different ways: the model who loses her face in a car accident; the young girl who longs for a life of more adventure, and who changes her identity day to day with a little makeup and no glasses; the young boy who hangs around a crowd of older boys just so he won't be seen as "sick" anymore, the suburban parents who fill their homes with things and fancy cars and country club memberships, but who hide anger and despair behind their smiles, and the terrorist who takes on personas and leaves them behind like yesterday's newspaper. It's scary to think that a person's identity can become a corporate entity--but Look At Me shows how that is happenening all around you, and makes you think "How much of me is really a reflection of capitalism?"
Overall, extremely well written, and compelling. My only gripe (and thus the 4 stars) is the ending. It felt rushed; almost as if the author was on a deadline and had to finish right away. Otherwise though, one of the best books of the year, and highly recommended.

Jennifer Egan's Look at Me, a National Book Award finalist, is a richly detailed novel which eerily describes cultural events that have come true in the six years since its original publication. The book tells interwoven stories of a high fashion model whose face is shattered and reconstructed following a car accident, a high school girl caught up in a secret affair distancing herself from her peers, and an embattled private eye fighting alcoholism and obsessed with a case involving the fashion model. The most mysterious character is a foreign man consumed by anger for all things American. He moves through society working on his accent and mannerisms, changing his name from town to town, plotting to destroy the American conspiracy.

Egan's novel not only discusses Middle Eastern sleeper cells in a pre-9/11/2001 world, it also predicts the absolute explosion of reality television and marketing, and the phenomenon of social networking on the Internet via tell-all personal spaces. (She wrote the novel over a six-year period and published in mid-2001).

The recurring theme is that of identity, and of the secret or shadow selves that we all hide. Egan's characters struggle to present the right face to the world (in some cases hiring manipulative publicists and marketers) while battling inner demons. The lives of her richly detailed characters gradually converge in a breathtaking climax that changes each one irrevocably.

"Look at Me" has been very hyped, but I found it thin and disappointing and it no doubt will quickly be forgotten. Jennifer Egan is smart, but little in the book exceeds the smart-alecky. The characters are two dimensional, the ideas academic and pretentious. Egan can't surpass the limitations she is trying to parody. If you're beyond being a "twenty something" and engaged by the coy and by "writing school" pseudocraftsmanship, you should skip this novel. Even in detail, there are a number of writing errors: "desert" when "dessert" is meant, "diffusing" for "defusing," repetitive language, that sort of thing. Hey, life is short: Read something better. I wish I had.

I don't read much contemporary fiction. I picked up this novel and was at first intrigued. It started strong--I was interested in Charlotte the New York model with the reconstructed face and Charlotte the Rockford, IL teenager who develops a romantic interest in a much older man.

But matters deteriorated from there. It wasn't just that Charlotte the model is totally unlikeable--although she is. It's that the characters and the situations they became involved in were totally unbelievable. Don't the characters and situations have to have the ring of truth? Shouldn't they? It made no sense that the NYU professor should end up volunteering to help a private detective elicit information from Charlotte the model by posing as a reporter. It made no sense that "Z" should encounter the New York Charlotte in a Manhattan club one night and that very night they're in Charlotte's car driving non-stop to Rockford (for no reason I could fathom). Nothing about the character Moose (Rockford Charlotte's uncle) made any sense at all. (And how did "Z"--some sort of Middle Easterner with an undefined grudge against the West but no particular trade or occupation--manage to obtain a teaching credential and land a position as a high school math teacher apparently just days after finding himself in Rockford for the first time in his life? And why would he have wanted to do that anyway?)

I have seen some reviews that say that the novel deals with questions of identity, selfhood, celebrity, consumer culture, etc. I suppose the novel glances at these issues but the author has nothing interesting to say about them as far as I can tell. I could have put up with some vaporings about those topics if only the characters were recognizably human and the plot lines credible in terms of what I know of life. Maybe it's wrong to demand that of a novel. But this novel does not present itself as a fantasy or a parable but as a look at contemporary life, so I feel we can hold it to a standard of minimal human credibility. I didn't see that in this book.

I thought I'd try this novel after reading Egan's collection "Emerald City," which had some wonderful short stories in it. The book begins with the life of a model after a tragic accident and reconstructive surgery, an interesting premise, then begins to get confusing as it gets interleaved with the life of a teenager somehow loosely connected to the model. I stuck with this, hoping for beautiful language or reasonable leads as to where the story was going, but it only got more and more confusing to me, and began taking on the elements of a mystery or detective piece, a much different path than both how the story began and what I was expecting after reading the author's other work. I'm sure others will disagree, but I don't like big changes like this. If I invest in reading 200 pages, I would expect the latter 200 to follow suit and deliver in a contemporary style consistently, and regrettably I didn't find it here. A novel that this one seems to try to rival would be Nicholas Christopher's "A Trip to the Stars," however in that one, we know right away what's in store for us, whereas in this one I think readers will struggle too hard to try to keep up.

Meet Charlotte Swenson...a once successful model living the good life until a harrowing car accident sends her through the windshield. She is left scarred physically and emotionally. Her identity is instantly altered with her appearance.

Meet yet another Charlotte...a teenager living in turmoil who is also looking to create a new identity for herself.

Both Charlotte's are leading parallel lives, one is learning to live her life over with a new face while the other is learning about love/lust and life for the first time. They both have to deal with esteem issues in a world obessesed with looks and perception.

The elder Charlotte was not a character that I really enjoyed however. She is cynical and selfish. She has a life built on lies, she prefers it that way. She is able to see the shadow selves of other people but we never get to see a clear picture of her. She is an enigma.

The character of "Z" is a frightening one. We are truly in the mind of a terrorist, a chameleon who surfaces in various places and studies the world around him.

While I found that there was a little too much going on with the plot in this book, Egan does get credit for being a wonderful writer. She can create amazing images with the touch of a pen. Her theme of identities, real and artificial, make us wonder about ourselves and those around us. Shadow selves...an interesting concept.

Jennifer Egan's terrific new novel, Look at Me, appears almost deceptively simple at first. Beautiful NY model loses face in car crash and struggles to regain her life. It's a interesting premise, but Egan certainly doesn't stop there. She explores the superficiality of our contemporary culture and its bizarre obsessions with a well done, insightful narrative. Charlotte, the model with the new face is not a supermodel, but a fairly successful, very smart, mid-30s woman who has seen it all, and thus sees much of what she sees for what it is. Charlotte's descriptions of what she sees in New York are sometimes scarily on target. The details of Charlotte's car accident are somewhat unclear, and to let us know what happened, Egan brings in another Charlotte--this one a teenager (and the daughter of model-Charlotte's high school best friend) seeking answers through her studies with her slightly mentally unstable professor uncle and her affair with a mysterious new high school math teacher. We follow the lives of both Charlottes for the months following the accident. Model Charlotte returns to New York and tries to develop a new life because her old one has essentially vanished with her old face. She becomes involved with a new internet venture--a sort of webcam meets Big Brother meets Real Life meets People magazine (the concept itself is a brilliant, thought-provoking idea on Egan's part). Teenage Charlotte is living in model Charlotte's old home town in the Midwest simply dealing with the difficulties of teenage life--and her involvement with these two older men.

Look At Me is a terrific novel, it's only flaw being that sometimes it gets a little too ambitious. It seems at times Egan is trying to communicate a message, but hasn't come up with a concrete way of communicating it. This, however, does not distract from the wonderful and thought provoking story this novel tells. Enjoy.