Estimated read time: 3-4 minutes
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In a castle nestled deep within an unnamed Eastern European nation, two cousins reunite years after a boyhood prank nearly killed one of them. The cousin left for dead is the polar opposite of his young self. Weird, chubby Howard has pulled himself up to become a wealthy businessman determined to make a New Age hotel of the ruins.
Danny, a good kid who did a bad thing, was on a downward path long before his cousin asked him to help renovate the castle. The once All-American boy lost himself in the wilds of Manhattan, plugged Borg-like into the ever-changing grid of who's in and who's out and what's happening and what's not.
Their fate in this sinister place is a story within a story in The Keep, Jennifer Egan's arresting third novel. Egan, a 2001 National Book Award finalist for her last novel, Look at Me, alternates the cousins' story with that of the man telling it, someone the reader first becomes aware of when a discordant observation is followed by: "You? Who the hell are you? That's what someone must be saying right about now. Well, I'm the guy talking."
The storyteller is Ray Dobbs, an inmate in an American prison who is taking a writing class and has become smitten with his teacher. He denies having any writing talent, just claiming to be repeating "stuff a guy told me."
Egan's clever construction thus establishes a multi-level mystery. Did Howard bring Danny to the castle to get revenge? Is Danny in danger or is he just paranoid? And who is Dobbs, who says he killed a man, in relation to them?
The Keep, named for the last-stand fortress on the castle grounds, is largely about Danny and Dobbs, with Danny's story a stream of rapid-fire thoughts, fears, neuroses and intermittent joy.
He's oddly endearing, a hyped-up Everyman suffering from cellphone withdrawal in this remote cocoon.
Dobbs' story is a slow flow of resignation, toughness and gradually awakening hope that ultimately leads into a narrative by Holly, the writing teacher, that finally brings all the pieces together.
There are elements of magic, although it's difficult to separate them from delusion. The fortress is occupied by the baroness, a member of a long-gone ruling class who refuses to vacate her home to its new owners.
When Danny first sees her, she is a girl in the tower window. The closer he comes, the older she gets and, suffice to say, she hasn't aged well.
Egan is a very good writer, insightful and often funny, so fluid that you actually have the sensation of sinking into these lives.
Danny likens a malodorous pool to a laundry list of smells he dislikes, and what he says about them is emblematic.
The everyday odors make him feel that "normal life was thin, it was flimsy: a flimsy thing stretched over another thing that was nothing like it, that was big and strange and dark."
But there's also the possibility of redemption beneath that flimsy veneer in Egan's strange and beautifully drawn landscape, a place well worth visiting.
The Keep
By Jennifer Egan
Knopf, 240 pp., $23.95
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