Customer Reviews

The Keep: A Novel

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(30)
2 star:		(26)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

Jennifer Egan's third novel opens with neo-punk cyber-junkie main character Danny arriving at his cousin Howie's dilapidated European castle. Howie couldn't even pin down which country the castle is in--Austria, Germany, or the Czech Republic--"because the borders are constantly sliding around." Howie's dream is to create the ultimate spiritual retreat, a place to escape from modern conveniences and telecommunications and commune with higher powers. Lost soul Danny is not receptive to this idea; at least until he spots a young, blonde apparition in the Keep, the inaccessible tower of the castle that serves as "the last stand, the final holdout. It's what you protect, and where you run to when the walls are breached." Danny accepted plane tickets from his cousin as an escape route from his troubles with mobsters back in New York, but he rejected the physical isolation of the castle by bringing along his own bulky satellite phone.

Howie and Danny have a tumultuous past relationship, ever since Danny played a childhood prank that went terribly wrong. Danny has nagging doubts about Howie's motives for summoning him to his castle-in-transformation, and as strange events unfold, he's not sure who to trust and what is authentic. (It doesn't help that he's naturally predisposed to paranoia, of course.)

Early on, Egan tosses in another aspect to the story: it is actually a creative writing task for a hardened prisoner. Our author, Ray, only joined the writing class to escape his cell, but his fictional work takes on a life of his own, especially after he develops a connection with his fragile, recovering teacher. He empathizes his character Danny, but he makes it clear that Danny isn't a self-portrait.

The narrative about Danny and the ghosts of the Keep smoothly parallels Ray's struggles in prison, and subtle connections can be made between the plot twists in both Ray and Danny's lives. The stories converge in a natural manner (yes, Egan can make the supernatural entirely real). The Keep is one of the best books of the year, and it's nearly impossible for a reviewer to re-create the experience in a few short paragraphs. Go ahead and pick this one up to see for youself!

With almost 100 reviews on this site, and so much publicity, it's discouraging to add yet another. (The chances of this being read are small, and the chances of it swaying any readers are even smaller.) But I am impelled by a kind of irritation. It's a familiar irritation: I gave several days to this book, and it was a waste, and I want to write to someone!

Of all the books I have read this year, this is the worst. I agree almost entirely with Simone Oltolina, whose review is currently (as I write this) posted as "most helpful unfavorable review." But I disagree with the reason she says "The Keep" doesn't work. It's not because there are narrative threads left dangling. The problem is more pervasive. It is that Egan can't fill out scenes: she can't describe characters, and she can't even describe settings. The dank pools, castle keeps, dungeons, and forests here have been conjured so intensely, by so many people -- from Novalis to King! -- that it just won't do to have them sketched so cursorily, so feebly, with so little visual sense. I propose this test: take any scene in the novel, and try to picture it. What you'll get is only a Hollywood set, and the details of that set will be from the movies you have seen, not even from the novel. The book is threadbare, and Egan is not a novelist: a least not the kind she hopes, in this book, to be.

I am sorry to be so poisonous, but that is what happens when I give my time to a book that is so poor. Maybe amazon's reviews serve a cathartic purpose. I want to put this one behind me, and maybe warn someone else at the same time.

Danny and Howard, cousins who have been out of touch since a cruel teenage prank ended in near disaster, are brought together again in their 30's when Howard offers Danny a ticket to come explore a medieval castle in Europe that is his latest business venture. Howard has made a huge success of himself, while Danny has been floating around, working clubs and restaurants in a state of arrested development. When Danny arrives at the castle, a place unconnected to the outside world in any way, he begins to see and experience things that border on the supernatural - an effect that Howard and his acolytes all seem to embrace. The gothic elements in the book are fun in these chapters, but not successfully carried through to clarity.
There is, however, a second major storyline that unfolds - a prisoner in jail who enters a writing program begins to lay out his own story - and we see before too long that the two storylines are connected. The clever plotting and changing narrative perspectives keep this book rolling toward a revelatory climax. After a somewhat slow start, it becomes hard to put down. The downsides lie in a certain lack of resolution and a `last act' plot thread development that disappoints.

There isn't much to be said about 'The Keep'. It's clearly an attempt to write something in the vein of the classic "gothic novel" but, unfortunately, it's a faulty one.

The main issue is that in the end, too many threads are simply left hanging in the air. Therefore, the book feels life a novel of atmospheres rather than plot-driven fiction. Nothing wrong with that 'per se' but, if that was the objective that the author set for herself, I think she should have opted for the short-fiction format.

This novel either feels too short (it clearly needs more space to solve all te narrative threads that are presented and then neglected) or too long (if plot wasn't the main concern, well, the author could have done without a lot of stuff and, again, turned this into a short-narrative)

If I hadn't the impression that Jennifer Egan IS after all a talented writer with a prolific imagination, I wouldn't be so offended, since the world is full of published writers without talent. But... one can clearly feel that she has her idea full of ideas, it's too bad she didn't took the time to develop them a little more.

If you are looking for a much more accomplished novel in the same vein, go for 'The Magus', by John Fowles.

I just finished reading this book and was utterly disappointed.
At the beginning of the novel, the story holds your attention because you're waiting for some sort of pay off. You want to find out how all of these characters and places fit together. Egan never delivers that to the reader. She leaves the reader hanging and feeling as if they just wasted their time and the money they spent on this book. Many characters are only developed on a surface level. Plot lines are put forth and never followed through on. The ending is far from brilliant; it's cliched and expected.

"The Keep," by Jennifer Egan, is entertaining popular fiction with a surprising literary twist. This novel contains three separate narratives, with three different narrators, yet each is artfully intertwined to create a satisfying whole--as a bonus, there is a thought-provoking thematic message...not something you typically find in popular fiction, and even less common in gothic thrillers! The prose is well done. It is difficult to juggle three narratives and three narrators, but I Egan has done an admirable job. I enjoyed this book not only for its intriguing structure and eerie story, but also because it kept me thinking about its theme long after I'd finished the last page...and, for me, that is often the mark of a good book.

The first narrative is a creepy modern gothic novel, complete with an ancient crumbling castle, a long-suppressed motive for revenge, a wicked old baroness who morphs into a young sexpot, ghostly apparitions, betrayals, obsessions, strange sounds, dark closed spaces, and dank smells. This narrative is told by Danny, a hip, ex-con, Generation-X, self-proclaimed cell phone junkie--a psychologically damaged survivor of a long string of failed attempts to make any kind of stable life. As the story opens, he has just arrived at a ruined castle near Prague owned by his multi-millionaire cousin Howard. Howard aims to turn the castle into a new-age psychological and spiritual retreat for people who want temporarily to take a vacation from the high-tech multi-media world and reacquaint themselves with their inner primitive imaginations. Howard has brought his cousin Danny over to the castle to help with the renovations...or is that just his cover story? The longer Danny stays in the castle away from any connection to the outside world, the greater his paranoia grows. Danny dwells on very real revenge motivations that his cousin might harbor against him for an extremely cruel childhood prank. Psychologically, Danny starts to unravel and the plot turns ominous.

The second narrative concerns the life of the author of the first narrative, a prisoner named Ray doing time for murder and writing a novel in installments as part of a behind-bars creative writing course. Ray says the castle story is something that a buddy told him, but we're never convinced of that...the story seems too real. Ultimately, the narrator's true identity in the story is revealed when Ray's full name is disclosed, but by that time we already suspect which character he is. Most of the prison narrative hinges on Ray's infatuation with his teacher, Holly--a woman who slowly starts to return his interest.

Holly is both the narrator and subject of the brief third and final section. Since the end of the second part already nicely concludes the previous two narratives, the reader expects this very short third section to serve as an epilogue. But Egan uses this section mainly to expand on her theme, not the narrative. I suspect that this will puzzle and disappoint popular fiction readers, who typically read a novel primarily for the story. Personally, I loved the ending. It highlighted the theme and brought it full-circle back to the beginning--that is, to the point early in the story where Howard and his wife describe how the round "Imagination Pool" might be used by future guests (see page 47).

So what is the theme of this unique gothic novel with a small literary twist? Actually it is quite serious. Egan aims to show that modern civilization robs its citizens of their imagination. Early in the novel, Danny's cousin Howard says: "We've lost the ability to make things up. We've farmed out that job to the entertainment industry, and we sit around and drool on ourselves while they do it for us" (p. 45). What the author is telling us, is that modern culture, with its ubiquitous cell-phone-wifi-video-clip-television-film culture, has imprisoned people's imaginations--they have lost touch with their innate ability to imagine and create entertaining narratives out of everyday experience. If modern man is bored, he turns on the TV or drops out with drugs. If ancient man was bored, he created ghost and goblins, saw monsters and gods floating overhead in the patterns of clouds, and felt ecstasy simply by experiencing the beauty of the natural world. This theme reverberates throughout the novel and the lives of its three main characters, and since there are multiple narrators, we get to understand this effect from various viewpoints.

This work is primarily an entertaining story, a compelling creepy gothic thriller--the addition of a strong literary theme is a bonus, and as I said in the beginning, not something you often find in popular fiction. I suspect this is the primary reason why this novel has produced so many mixed reviews: it neither fully satisfies the popular fiction reader nor the literary reader, but it is a very good book.

My advice: enjoy the story, but take a little time to think about, and perhaps savor, the theme, if you do, it will heighten and prolong your enjoyment of the whole.

I was truly impressed by the utter emptiness of this new novel. But I have no one else to blame but myself, since I knew nothing about it before shelling out over $24. I should have been more on guard, but I wasn't. What I found when I opened the cover and turned the pages was something like a tribute to the cliche, a celebration of lame, flabby banality, a festivel of mediocrity, nicely tarted up as a "brainy cultural commentary" (an actual review quote). The only brainy thing about this book was the slick con job pulled off by the Knopf marketing department. They deserve five stars.

The "characters" in this brainy cultural commentary all seem to have stopped growing around the age of 12. The dialogue is agonizingly weak and it is not resurrected by the use of punctuation oddities or tinkering with the margins. She ain't no e.e. cummings. I kept wondering if I had left the television on as I was reading this brainy cultural commentary. But it was not on, that was the tinny sound of the two dimensional nonentities who populate this book yakking at each other.

This is surely on my top ten list of truly bad novels, up there with The Historian by Whatshername Kostova. Do yourself a favor and move away from this section of the bookstore with "intelligence and velocity" (another quote from inside the dust jacket.

There is a game you play in summer camp where the leader will start a story, leaving off on a cliff-hanger. The person to his left will pick up the story, and so on around the camp fire until you come to the last person, who then needs to resolve it.

Sometimes you get a camper who doesn't quite understand the rules of the game, and will resolve everything too quickly, or randomly kill off the main character, or wander off into a completely unrelated tangent. If all three happen, and you keep a transcript, you might end up with The Keep.

It starts of promisingly enough. The novel was full of cliches, but I was fooled by the comparisons to Calvino on the cover into thinking that the author was simply playing with genre and knew what she was doing. A few parts gave me pause (e.g. a cartoon-like scene where the main character accidentally falls out of a stone window, but catches himself with his toes), and a prison side story was mediocre, but the gothic story was fun enough that I forgave the author.

And then, when she has all the players in place and facing danger, 2/3 of the way through the book, she resolves everything in three pages. As in: They were all in a lot of danger, but then they escaped! The end. And it was a cheesy, silly, B-movie grade deus ex-machina ending, at that.

Every character in the gothic story is then abandoned for the prison story.

Then the prison story is abandoned for a story about a meth addict and her family.

Spoiler Alert:

And then the meth addict goes to the castle and kills herself.

The end.

It was that bad.

This might have worked out better as a collection of short stores or as three separate books...as written, it's an intriguing idea with lots of potential that really doesn't come together or feel fulfilling to the reader after it's all said and done. The initial story line is a group of cousins at a family reunion where something tragic and beyond mean is done to Howie by Danny. The book then shifts almost immediately to a prison where we learn that the characters we've just gotten hooked on are in fact fictional, the writing project of an inmate (Ray). From this point, the events of Ray's prison life and his attempted wooing of the writing teacher are alternated with the continued building of the Danny/Howie drama...after the "incident" Howie goes on to become a successful dot com entrepreneur with family and early retirement as a millionaire while Danny is a dedicated cyber-junkie living life in the fast lane. He goes to an unspecified location in Eastern Europe to a crumbling told castle at Howie's insistence (and to get away from his troubles back in New York). What should be a second chance for everyone involved (in both stories) slowly begins to deteriorate and the stories more or less parallel this spiral into bleakness for all involved.

Egan seems unable to chose a genre and stick it out so we wind up with a mixed bag of modern gothic, part suspense thriller, part morality tale, with a bit of romance and redemption thrown in near the end. I truly wanted to like the story, but none of the characters in the three stories are fully fleshed out, the endings are quite abrupt and left me feeling confused about what it all really meant in the end (what the author's intended message was), and the writing was quite choppy, though I do get that some of that was intentional as part of the storyline of having a convicts writing assignment as 1/3 it. I guess it's disappointing mostly because it started out with such promise...a crumbly old castle complete with Keep and cantankerous Baroness, certainly a wonderful atmospheric element for any story...but it just never fully develops. I wanted more from it, the parallels between the Keep story and the prison are interesting, one can see a kind of reverse parallel between the Keep itself (to keep the inhabitants safe and the bad guys out) and the prison (to keep the bad guys in and the outside world safe) but in the end, it's an ambiguous connection that never really delivers anything satisfying. I wound up giving The Keep three stars instead of four because I felt so unsatisfied at the end. I'd definitely check this out from the library or wait until the paperback comes out, I wouldn't pay hardback prices for a book that just doesn't deliver on any of its plots when it's all said and done.

I'm disappointed, almost to the point of being offended. It's obvious the author is exceptionally talented at creating characters and keeping the plot moving so that I just had to stay up late in the night to finish. But she left so many loose ends and wrote uneccessary diversions. It seemed as if she tried to pack in far too many plot devices of various genres which left her novel without cohesion. All action in a novel should have a point -- what was the point of Danny's rendevous with the Baroness? And what was the point of her changing ages? And was that town a made-up place? We're just meant to believe that Howie and his family run their hotel now? And the motivation for the murder? Come on, to stay number 2? That's just not believable. I can think of so many more instances of loose ends (and who really cares about Holly or wants to? That tacked on ending was uneccessary). I was completely ready to recommend this book to all of my friends, but after finishing, I'll spare them the disappointment.