When Jennifer Egan came up with the idea for Ordinary People,
the online docutainment series that plays a prominent role in her second
novel, Look at Me, it was 1995 and she was still two years away from
logging on to the Internet. She had intended for the website, which selects a
group of, you guessed it, ordinary people and provides viewers with round-
the-clock access to their personal lives, to be appallingly ludicrous, but pop
culture moved so fast, she ruminated over lunch in Brooklyn one early October
afternoon, "it doesn't seem funny and crazy anymore, it seems like social
commentary."
But in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade
Center, what will most likely be remembered about the novel is the character
of Z, an Islamic fundamentalist who blends so well into American culture
while preparing to attack that he ends up going native, fleeing from his
terrorist cell and recreating himself as a schoolteacher in Rockford, Illinois."
The classic suicide terrorist profile is a young man with nothing to lose," she
says, explaining how she came to create Z, "no family ties, no sophistication,
little or no education. And that didn't really work for me as a character, so I
made my guy much more sophisticated. I worried that once the dotcom
company became less satirical and more realistic, the terrorist character
would seem too far out, too wacky, out of synch with the rest of the book."
Reading the book now, however, the idea of a well-educated terrorist moving
freely through American culture seems chillingly prescient.
RH: Yet when you were writing, the concept of Islamic
fundamentalist sleeper agents would have been considered
unusual, if not outlandish.
JE: Especially a very capable one. One way in which I departed from my
research is that my impression was that these guys were mostly bumblers. If
you remember the bombing at the World Trade Center in 1993...seven people
died, of course, but it was still a very slipshod effort in a lot of ways. My
impression talking to counterterrorism experts, seconded by my close reading
of the New York Times over several years, was that these people weren't
a huge threat. We knew they were around, but there was a sense that they
couldn't get it together to do anything much, and I believed that too.
RH: Are you still giddy with excitement about the National Book
Award nomination?
JE: I'm having trouble believing it still. I feel like I've gotten into a
really good college by mistake, like I don't deserve it. (smiles) I'm very
happy, but it seems incredible to me that with all those books, I've been named
as one of the five fiction nominees.
I spent six years giving the novel everything I had... There've been moments
in the last few weeks where I wasn't sure what was going to happen to the
book, where I was wondering if the last six years were going to amount to
nothing much. So I feel like this is a second chance in a way; maybe more
people will read it now.
RH: One of the common characterizations of Look at Me is
that it's about "a model whose face is destroyed in a car accident."
Which is not only untrue--Charlotte suffers facial injuries, but
not disfigurement--it makes the book sound like a potboiler.
JE: That's another reason I'm grateful for the nomination. The book has
been described in the media in a way that is unappealing to the readers that I
need. Somebody who wants to read about models is going to hate this book, and
the kind of reader that will like it may be driven away by the fact that it's
about a model. Looking back, I should have seen this confusion coming, but I
don't really know much about marketing books. I just try to write good ones.
(smiles)
I think people have wanted the book to be about other things and got upset
that it wasn't. It's a very hard book to describe, because there are several
plotlines, and you do have to pick one. I guess you could say that's the central
one. Charlotte is sort of the backbone of the novel, but that characterization of
her situation grossly misrepresents the book. It makes me see how...well, if
Don Delillo weren't Don Delillo, how would you describe Underworld? Not
that I'm saying my book's as good as that, but they're similar in that they're
both complicated books with multiple plotlines.
RH: So you reduce it to a story about the baseball that Bobby
Thomson hit to send the Giants to the World Series.
JE: And some readers would love to read a book about that, but then be
completely disappointed in Underworld, and other people won't want to
read about baseball.
I've learned how useful it is to have a premise that you can just say quickly
and have people understand. Like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections: a
family story with a postmodern flourish. Great! That sounds interesting, it
sounds appealing. But a disfigured model? It sounds almost bathetic, like
Autobiography of a Face only by somebody you could care less about.
The next time I finish a book, and since I take so long to write this is a ways
off, I'll have to think about whether there's a path of least resistance people
could take in trying to characterize the book that would misrepresent it. If I
think that's true, I'm going to work very hard to fend that off from the
beginning.
RH: What was the first hook that drew you into this story?
JE: I don't really start with a plot. I start with an atmosphere more than
anything. The first thing that I had was that I wanted to write about the
midwest. Rockford, Illinois, where a lot of the book takes place, is my mom's
hometown. I kept having an urge to go back there, which is weird, because it
really didn't have much to offer apart from my family, and once my
grandparents were dead... But when I went back, I didn't feel alienated and
weird; I got this sense that I was in the middle of someplace important. I got an
almost electrical sense that my next book was going to happen here.
Other little pieces came to me. I knew that there'd be a mad historian,
somebody who was really obsessed, and a young girl who was an acolyte of his.
I knew that there would be a chameleon, somebody who shed his identities, but
I didn't know from the beginning that he'd turn out to be a terrorist.
I was driving to Rockford on one of my visits, and I was in a thunderstorm that
was so sever we just had to pull over. The rain was just smashing against the
windshield. So the car's stopped between two cornfields, and I had the radio on,
and I suddenly had an idea about a woman going off the road in the middle of a
storm. But, again, I didn't know at first that she was a model.
Those were the things I had to begin with, and I wasn't sure how they would
fit together. But piece by piece, the story began to illuminate itself. It took a
long time to get it right, though. I didn't want to just altnernate chapters; I
find that very formulaic. So then I had to think about when we switch from
one plotline to another. And the stories are told so differently, Charlotte's in
first person, the others in third person. The issue of control, of connecting the
two voices so that they seemed to be united, was very difficult. It was beyond
my range technically when I started, so I had to expand my range, my skills,
in order to do it. That's always the fun stuff. If you just do what you know how
to do, you keep doing the same thing.
RH: You were also working as a journalist while writing this
novel. Did you choose assignments because they were helpful for
the book, or take subjects you'd written about for assignments and
incorporate them into the fiction?
JE: I'm usually circling an array of ideas at any given time, and those
ideas govern my fiction and my nonfiction decisions, so it's no surprise that
the two end up overlapping. I accepted the modeling assignment for my
research. I didn't know anything about models in New York, and I'd already
made a few fumbling attempts to get access to models for research. You can
imagine how excited they were to have an unknown novelist hang around. I'd
never really done journalism before, but I got asked if I would be interested in
doing this story. At first I was concerned about having to spend so much time
on the story, and especially about having to write it, but it was almost like a
gift for the novel. If it hadn't been for the novel, I probably wouldn't have
done the article, because I was so worried about failing at it. It was always
intended to be a cover story for the Times Sunday magazine, and I
thought, "How can I do this?" But I figured that at least I'd have my research
for the novel done, and I would get some money, even if it was just the kill
fee.
Some assignments I accept just because I'm interested in the material, even if
it's not in the book I'm writing. Like cutting--I took that assignment just
because it interested me, and it wasn't until after writing that article that I
came up with the scene in Look at Me where the photographer is cutting
models' faces.
RH: A bizarre scene, but then, you originally conceived of
Look at Me as a satire...
JE: ...and wrote it as a satire, too! But the buying and selling of lives that
I found so outrageous when I dreamed it up... It's not like everything I wrote
about it has come to pass, but when I started reading about the wave of reality
programming after Survivor, I thought I was reading an April Fool's
edition. I thought it just couldn't be possible. What I wrote just doesn't read as
satire anymore, and that disappoints me for two reasons. One is that the novel
just doesn't read the way I always intended it, but beyond that, I'm so appalled
that what I imagined as a grotesque scenario is now reality.
So many things started coming up after I'd written them, though, that I'm not
as surprised by what's happened now. When I started writing about Moose, the
Unabomber hadn't been caught yet. He was out there, but the manifesto hadn't
been published, we didn't know he was an academic. After I wrote about
Charlotte being fascinated by old ads painted on the sides of buildings, there
was a newspaper article about an exhibit of photographs of those types of
signs at the New York Historical Society. So I went to the exhibit, and some of
the pictures they had were of buildings I'd been looking at while I was
thinking about those scenes... So I had these kinds of experiences a lot.
Now the book looks like it's on target, but I was really trying to be ahead of the
curve. Maybe the problem's just that I write too slowly. (smiles) I think
it still reads as satirical, but not quite to the inventive degree I hoped.
RH: Both of your novels have narrative elements of the thriller,
but you're clearly not writing thrillers.
JE: The Invisible Circus is more overtly like a mystery. Somebody
has died, we're not sure why, and we try to find out. But if you tried to market
it as a mystery, it wouldn't have worked; there's other things going on
mystery fans wouldn't care for. Look at Me...I didn't think about that this
time. I was more concerned that with so many plotlines, it would be hard to tie
it together and keep the momentum going, to make it feel like one big story
moving forward.
I don't really read thrillers now, though I loved mysteries as a kid, even the
really debased ones like Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins and the Hardy
Boys. To some degree the excitement of reading and looking for an answer has
stayed with me and influenced my writing. Whenever I pick up a thriller,the
problem for me is that the writing is so bad. You can hear the plot machinery
creaking, and nothing is compelling to me if it's in lifeless prose. Some people
can combine thriller stories and good writing. Scott Turow's Presumed
Innocent is a very good book, which I loved. Donna Tartt's The Secret
History had a very lush prose to it as well.
RH: What was the experience of the film adaptation of The
Invisibile Circus like?
JE: I got a lot of money when I really needed it, so it's been a positive
experience for me. In a way, that's the beginning and the end of the
discussion. Oh, and my mom and I got to visit the set and meet Cameron Diaz.
I found it hard to read the screenplay. Reading my book boiled down to
something that could be shot in ninety minutes, I found that it was missing a
lot of the past, what film people would call the "backstory," the things that
explained the character's present behavior. So I was worried about how
understandable the character's actions would be without that underpinning. I
also realized how melodramatic the story was. Somehow that had been lost on
me as I was working on it, as the literary elements cushioned all the tearful
confrontations and revelations. (laughs)
I never got to see the final version, because my baby had just been born, and I
never had time to arrange for a babysitter or anything so I could get out to the
theatre before the film left. But I think that it was done in good faith. Adam
Brooks [the film's writer and director] and I were interested in many of the
same things, and I think that it's a really honest project. I'm looking forward
to renting it now that it's on video.
RH: What's going on now?
JE: Right now, I'm writing an article for the Times about babies
born to women in prison. I'm not sure what my next fiction project is. I've had
a collection in mind for a while, called A Visit from the Goon Squad, and
I've already written some stories for that. But I can't just sit down and say, "OK,
I'm going to work on stories for ten months." For me, stories are always
something I slip into between other things.
I'd love to get deep into another novel, but it would have to be something
simple, not a complicated story like this one. For a while, I wanted to do a
gothic story with a huge plot twist, but I haven't been able to sustain a sense of
possibility about that idea, so I don't know where it's going to go anymore.
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