Egan, Jennifer. Look at Me. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

I read Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad in 2012 to study how nonlinear plots work and enjoyed it very much. This earlier book, her second novel, is a bit more traditional although she does some very interesting things like presenting the main character’s chapters by way of first person but the rest of the chapters in third person; she also cuts, rotating quickly from one character’s point of view (omnisciently) to the next in one of the final chapters, to sustain suspense and perhaps coalesce their views into one. It would seem that the basic plot is that one Charlotte Swenson, a beautiful young fashion model is involved in a car accident, and the surgeon who puts her face back together does so (and I find this hard to believe) with eighty titanium screws just beneath the skin. Her face is still beautiful, but it is no longer her face. People don’t recognize her. She is invisible.
 
But Charlotte is not without curiosity, a certain inventiveness, to keep her life interesting after losing her livelihood (her booker can no longer get her any modeling jobs)—including a festive sex life. By her own recognizance she can identify what she calls the shadow self of almost any person with whom she comes in contact. Later in the novel, she encounters a man who will now direct a television special about her accident and recovery, in which she plays herself. Even though outwardly he is somewhat fit and sophisticated, she limns his shadow self as an insecure fat kid, the one lurking just beneath the surface of his life, his skin. Though Charlotte’s character is flawed, she leads us to believe she is an astute judge of character, and we tend to believe her.
 
As with any fine novel, there is a lot going on here. Egan weaves together the story that Charlotte and two other characters are destined to tell, along with a cast of supporting characters, who, in themselves, are fascinating: for one, Z, a young Middle Eastern would-be terrorist who seems to adapt to America quite well; also, a recently recovered alcoholic detective; a mysterious teacher who is seduced by a young female pupil (one of the three main characters) and has also come from some distant or foreign background (one almost thinks that he and Z could be one, but no, ‘tis not true). Jennifer Egan is one of those novelists who meticulously create plot, who meticulously create believable characters to carry it out, all in the service of larger literary themes which are also captured by a title as apt as Look at Me.
 
By the way, this is an “Advance Reading Copy” that claims it is “Not for Sale.” However, I paid twelve dollars for it at a used book store, and I wuz robbed. I can now see at least one good reason publishers do not want readers to see this sort of copy sold. It had (I always mark them) a variety of twenty-one typos, averaging more than one per chapter. And those are just the ones I caught.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World  |  Debbie Cenziper's Citizen 865: The Hunt for Hitler’s Hidden Soldiers in America

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Andrew H. MacAndrew and with an introductory essay by Konstantin Mochulsky. New York: Bantam, 1970.

Another book that sat on my shelf unread, this time since 1986. 936 pages. This was nineteenth-century entertainment: a book that might take readers twenty hours to read. I’m not sure twenty-first century readers believe they have twenty hours to spend on one book. Even the denouement and epilogue take up the last one hundred pages. My mental image of this book was always four brothers kicking their heels up, Cossack style, in great revelry, but, ah, no.
 
One of the four is said to be illegitimate, Smerdyakov. The eldest of the remaining brothers is Mitya or Dmitry. Next is Vanya or Ivan. And the youngest is Alyosha or Alexei. The Russian literary custom of assigning multiple names to a character broadens his or her dynamic, more so than the Anglo/American Bob and Robert or Jim and James. I’m not sure why. Perhaps the author uses a different name depending on the context.
 
No need to belabor the plot: Readers become acquainted with all four brothers. Certain conflicts arise between father and sons, particularly father and Dmitry. Father is found dead and one of the sons is accused of his murder. Like all epic novels, the author spends a great deal of leisurely time acquainting readers with each character, even the minor ones, so that one’s curiosity nearly rivals the curiosity one has in waiting to see what happens next in, say, a soap opera or an evening TV series. Only with much more gravitas. I’m certainly glad I spent the time reading this novel with a time-worn theme that surprisingly still reads fresh almost two hundred years after its writing.

​Watson, Robert P. The Nazi Titanic:  The Incredible Untold Story of a Doomed Ship in World War II. Boston: Da Capo, 2016.

​Even as a child, I was a sucker for disaster reads, particularly those taking place at sea: Titanic, Andrea Doria, and others. Watson seizes upon the fame of the Titanic to make a case for his story about the German ship, Cap Arcona  (German for Cape Arcona). Without the Titanic reference in the title, the book might not have much shelf appeal. I’m not sure that there are too many real parallels between the two ships except that they both sank. 
 
Nevertheless, Watson’s book is a fascinating one about the extraordinary history of a German luxury liner that services travelers from the Baltic to South America from 1927 until 1939. At that time the Nazis expropriate the ship and transform it for war purposes. Its most important history comes at the end of its life, in 1945, and I’m not going to spoil the read by giving away the ending. Suffice it to say that the Cap Arconastory is one that has been overlooked, and we have Robert Watson to thank for keeping it and its historical significance alive.

Porter, Regina. The Travelers. New York: Hogarth, 2019.

This barely three-hundred-page novel contains a cast of thirty-five characters and spans nearly fifty years of American life from the 1970s until President Obama’s first term in office. At times, one must check back at the beginning to see who is whom. But for the most part, Porter does a remarkable job of refreshing the reader’s memory when the time comes. Even more remarkable, she paints a picture of our country as it really is: a world inhabited by white and black people who intermarry, have children, some of whom belong to the LGBTQ community. Is it all love and roses as our hippy friends of the seventies (including me) had hoped our future would be? Not by a long shot. The life she unearths is as messy as an all-white or an all-black one, but it is a life that is also marked with joys and trials of raising children, finding one’s own place in the world. This is a novel of high and low culture, one in which Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, becomes a major motif throughout the book, but a work in which current argot makes a place for itself without being annoying. It is a novel that requires the reader to put the nonlinear pieces together, a novel for now and  always.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-50  Oregon