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Look at Me A conversation with Jennifer Egan about Look at Me. Your novel is the story of two Charlottes—one a model at the end of her career who is recovering from a car accident and major reconstructive surgery, the other a sexually precocious teenager who embarks on a liaison with a high school teacher. How are these two women connected? The connection between the Charlottes is intentionally oblique. After writing The Invisible Circus, in which the action of the novel is rather fully explained psychologically, I wanted to write a book whose connections were felt rather than understood, a book that was more deeply mysterious. The younger Charlotte is the daughter of the elder Charlotte's best friend from adolescence. To some extent, physical appearance is the determining factor in both Charlottes' lives: Charlotte, the model, who is beautiful, has spent her life in pursuit of what she calls "the mirrored room," a transcendent locus of glamour and celebrity; the younger Charlotte, plain and isolated from her peers, ekes out a secret life on the fringes of the adult world, both through an affair with an enigmatic teacher and a tutorial with her eccentric uncle. Finally, the two Charlottes are linked by a mystery: A man has disappeared from the older Charlotte's world and appeared, with a new identity, in the younger Charlotte's. A good portion of the novel is set in Rockford, Illinois, and it includes a great deal of local history about the city's development. How does this history figure into your story? The history comes into play in the context of the younger Charlotte's Uncle Moose, a mentally unstable history professor who begins tutoring Charlotte. Moose was derailed in his early twenties by an apocalyptic vision of America's future and nearly blew up Yale University as part of a "thought experiment." Now an obsessive scholar of the Industrial Revolution, Moose becomes convinced that Charlotte is on the verge of witnessing the same revelation that first transformed him. The history comes into play in two ways: First, it is the language Moose and Charlotte speak to each other; I wanted to render their platonic love affair in dialogue that rarely strays from grain elevators and railroads. In a larger sense, I intended Rockford's industrial awakening of the last century to serve as a counterpoint to the story's other half, in which New York and all of America are poised on the verge of a second technological juggernaut wrought by the Internet. You completed this novel before "Reality TV" became a buzzword, and yet Charlotte (the elder) becomes involved with an Internet project that reads like something off Fox Television's programming schedule. How do you feel your novel dovetails with our current obsession with reality-based shows? I was terrified by the ways in which reality imitated the Internet thread of my novel, but by now I've made my peace with the fact that my whacko invention—an Internet service that packages "ordinary" people's lives for public consumption—could easily happen in our present culture, and that my imagination was barely ahead of the facts. I think that our culture's image saturation has resulted in a kind of media hangover—a longing for experience that is unmediated, or "authentic." At the same time, the habit of looking outside our own lives for satisfaction is so deeply ingrained by now that the media themselves end up being purveyors of this "unmediated" experience. "Reality," then, has been fetishized into a style: a simulacrum of authenticity that appears to satisfy the viewer's genuine longing for it, but, in fact, leaves him empty. And the media respond to that emptiness with ever greater contortions of simulated reality, which is what I wanted to explore in Look at Me. You have covered issues like modeling, self-mutilation, and gays on the Internet for The New York Times Magazine, and some of these topics come into play in the novel. Did you plan to use some of your research in the novel or did the novel evolve as you filled your assignments? Some of my assignments—the modeling story, for example, and a smaller one I did for another magazine on skateboarding culture—I accepted specifically because I wanted to do research for Look at Me. Generally, though, I accept assignments that arouse my curiosity, and what interests me at a particular time are often themes and topics that I'm already exploring in my fiction. What does the title Look at Me mean for you? Several things: Most obviously, "Look at me" might as well be our cultural credo; the hunger for an audience is that deep and pervasive. At the same time, the title embodies a paradox, because the cultivation of one's outward self so often occurs at the expense of any real human connections. From this perspective, "Look at me" is a kind of plea—a desire to be recognized in a deep and human way. Finally, most importantly, "Look at me" raises the question of who "me" really is. Are the images we construct for public consumption really ourselves? And, if not, then what is the relationship between those images and our real selves? How can they coexist? How do they interact? |
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