The Keep
One thing I love about the summer is that even with 2 beautiful, attention-demanding kids, a homestead that needs upkeep, friends that want to burn meat with various devices, and the need to luxuriate in the deep of existence, I still have time to read scads and scads of pages. Yesterday, I was able to start and finish Jennifer Egan’s The Keep. The last time I did that was, like, last summer, I think. It was glorious.
The Keep has two narratives going that merge towards the end for the big reveal. One narrative is about Danny, a going-nowhere aging hipster who travels to a castle in an unnamed Eastern European country to help his cousin Howard convert it into a postmodern (pre-modern?) hotel. When they were kids, Danny played a trick on his cousin that went horribly wrong and now he isn’t sure if his cousin is looking for payback or truly has his best interests in mind. There are moat-fulls of gothic elements: dead twins, mysterious baronnesses, ghosts, secrets, and underground passageways filled with torture devices. But the story itself feels modern. The tension between the two keeps the novel fresh while infusing it with some of the power of the gothic genre.
But what I loved most about it was that Egan can write a description like few can. She constantly chooses offbeat metaphors and details that surprise but still explain. The magic she exhibits in doing this reminds me about how hard it is to teach students to do the same.
When he first came to New York, he and his friends tried to find a name for the relationship they craved between themselves and the universe. But the English language can up short: perspective, vision, knowledge, wisdom–those words were all too heavy or too light. So Danny and his friends made up a name: alto. True alto worked two ways: you saw but you could also be seen, you knew and were known. Two-way recognition. Standing on the castle wall, Danny felt alto–the world was still with him after all these years, even though the friends were long gone. Grown up, probably,
I love how the paragraph conveys not only how Danny feels, but some of the self-absorbedness of his view. He stays sympathetic even if not always admirable. Apparently, there are some talks about movie version, which would be difficult and very likely to rely on the reveal instead of the atmosphere.
If you get a chance, take a look at the official website for the book. It has a feel of a ARG with testimonials by the author, news, and photos of The Keep. Still, none of them really go anywhere. Or at least I couldn’t make it anywhere. A real, honest-to-goodness gothic ARG would have been a cool addition to the publicity for this book.
The Keep would be a good novel to have in the bookshelf and before I send it back to the library, I want to cherry-pick some strong paragraphs to use as models with my kids. Her Look at Me was on the shortlist for the National Book Award, so that might be a good one to pick up after I’m done with All about Lulu and All the Sad Literary Men.
