The Keep

In Jennifer Egan's deliciously creepy new novel, two cousins reunite twenty years after a childhood prank gone wrong changed their lives and sent them on their separate ways. "Cousin Howie," the formerly uncool, strange, and pasty ("he looked like a guy the sun wouldn't touch") cousin has become a blond, tan, and married millionaire with a generous spirit. He invites his cousin Danny (who as an insecure teenager left him hurt and helpless in a cave for three days) to help him renovate an old castle in Germany. To reveal too much would ruin the story, just know that The Keep is a wonderfully weird read--a touch experimental in terms of narrative, with a hefty dose of gothic tension and mystery--balanced by an intimate and mesmerizing look at how the past haunts us in different ways. --Daphne Durham 10 Second Interview: A Few Words with Jennifer Egan Q: What is your writing process like? Has it differed from book to book? A: My writing process seems to be a strange one, at least compared with other writers I've talked to. I begin with very little: usually just a strong sense of time and place--of atmosphere--and a few abstract notions that I want to explore. In the case of The Keep , I had a yen to set a book in what I'll call a gothic environment: an isolated, crumbling structure whose heyday is long past, and where eerie things begin to happen. As for the notions, I was curious about telecommunications: the way that cell phones and the Internet have made so many of us accustomed to nearly constant disembodied communication--a state traditionally associated with supernatural experience. I loved the idea of letting modern telecommunications collide with a gothic environment and seeing what would happen. I write by hand--usually one long draft that I scribble out quickly (5-10 pages a day) and poorly. I do this almost completely from the gut, with very little sense of where I'm going. It's often in the process of this almost unconscious writing that I discover characters and action. When the first draft is done, I type it into the computer (the parts I can read anyway; I have wretched handwriting) and see what I've got. Not a word of that first draft usually makes it anywhere near the final draft--which, in the case of some chapters of Look at Me , my last novel, was sixty to seventy drafts later. I edit by hand on a hard copy, then type in the changes and print it out again for further editing. The writing itself always remains instinctive, but there is a strong analytical counterpart, when I figure out what I'm doing in terms of plot, characters, thematic underpinnings, and then scheme about how I can do it better. I save every draft until a book is done; a towering pile of paper that I eventually, joyfully, recycle. Q: Some of the most powerful (and terrifying) moments in the book deal with claustrophobia. Are you claustrophobic? A: I almost never write about myself, or things that have happened in my own life, or about people I know. I like to make all of it up--or at least, I think I'm making it up, until later I realize how much of my own experience has crept into my books, disguised even from me. For example: I'm not claustrophobic, but I've certainly been paranoid, and the two are closely linked. I wanted to capture the way that paranoia (like claustrophobia) can instantly turn a benign environment into an unmitigated nightmare. One question is always at the center of such experiences: is this real, or am I making it up? We live in very paranoid times. I was interested in the way paranoia can make someone turn threatening and aggressive in exactly the ways they perceive the world to be. They become the very monster they fear. Q: What author/s have inspired you? A: In the big, long-term ways: Lawrence Sterne, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Emile Zola, George Eliot, Robert Stone, Don DeLillo, Jean Rhys. For The Keep , the list is slightly different. There are some fantastic (and totally insane) Gothic novels that I had a ball reading: Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto , Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer , Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho , Matthew Lewis's The Monk --those are all 18th century books--and then from the 19th century, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White , which is an absolutely drop-dead great thriller. From Publishers Weekly Claustrophobic paranoia, intentionally mediocre writing and a transparent gimmick dominate Egan's follow-up to Look at Me , centered on estranged cousins who reunite in Eastern Europe. Danny, a 36-year-old New York hipster who wears brown lipstick (and whose body can detect Wi-Fi availability), accepts his wealthy cousin Howard's invitation to come to Eastern Europe and help fix up the castle Howard plans on turning into a luxury Luddite hotel (check your cell at the door). In doing so, Danny can't help recalling the childhood prank he played on a young Howie that left the awkward adolescent nearly dead—or so writes Ray, the druggie inmate who's penning this novel-within-a-novel for his prison writing workshop. Subsequent chapters alternate between Danny's fantastical castle travails (it's home to a caustic baroness bent on preserving her family seat) and Ray's prison drama. There are funny asides and trappings (particularly digital technology) along the way, and the sendup of castle narratives generates some chuckles. But the connection between the two narratives, which Egan reveals in intentionally tawdry fashion, feels telegraphed from the first chapter, making for a frustrating read. (Aug.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From The New Yorker This neo-gothic tale conjures a wicked form of therapy for BlackBerry-addicted urbanites. Egan sends Danny, her twitchy protagonist, on a trip from Manhattan to a crumbling Eastern European castle that is too remote for cell phones, television signals, even roads. Danny's mind, previously weighed down with useless information, takes flight, and he soon becomes unsure whether an alluring baroness he meets on the castle grounds is real or a figment. Egan's clever scenario presents Danny's mental liberation as both thrilling and dangerousx97imagination is the ultimate drug, she suggestsx97and the novel luxuriates in Wilkie Collins-style atmospherics. But Egan spoils things with an unsavory framing device: Danny's story, we learn, has been written by a convict in a jail cell. The juxtaposition perversely suggests that prison is an even better place to unclutter your brain and summon a good yarn. Copyright © 2006 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker From Bookmarks Magazine Jennifer Egan's The Keep garnered more mixed reviews than her National Book Award finalist Look at Me . While critics compared aspects of the new novel to Stephen King's The Shining and HBO's The Sopranos in its creative and visionary daring, many felt that Egan has too many tricks up her sleeve here. Some praised her framing device with its multiple narratives (Ray's novel-within-a-novel), but others called it ponderous and apparent from the start. Yet there's no question that this gothic talex97replete with a castle, a tower, and ample torturex97contains vivid, all-too-realistic descriptions, provoking themes of imprisonment, and great suspense. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. From Booklist The author of The Invisible Circus (1994) and Look at Me (2001) employs gothic conventions in an absorbing examination of the clash between the Old and New Worlds. The story of two cousins, Danny and Howard, who reunite to renovate an eastern European castle Howard has purchased, is narrated by Ray, a tormented convict who is desperate to make a connection with his writing teacher in the prison. Insisting the story is one that has merely been passed on to him by another man, Ray tells about how Danny leaves New York ambivalent about the prospect of helping Howard with his project. When Danny and Howard were boys, Danny and his other cousins played a cruel prank on Howard, and Danny worries that Howard, now a powerful man, hasn't forgiven him. Danny arrives at the castle uneasy, and his main desire is to set up a satellite dish and reconnect with the outside world. When the dish is lost, a devastated Danny ventures into the castle keep, where one of the family members of the castle's original owners, the baroness, has stationed herself. Danny's encounter with the baroness sends the novel careening toward a jaw-dropping revelation. Atmospheric and tense, this is a mesmerizing story. Kristine Huntley Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved For The Keep “Jennifer Egan is a refreshingly unclassifiable novelist. . . . Egan sustains an awareness that the text is being manipulated by its author, while at the same time delivering character and story with perfect and passionate conviction. Very few writers, in our time or any other, have been able to bring that off . . . the dazzling presentation makes us believe that it really is a matter of life, death and salvation. . . . The result is a work both prodigiously entertaining and profoundly moving.”—Madison Smartt Bell, The New York Times Book Review “Intelligent, challenging and exciting. . . . The characters’ emotions are so real, the author’s insights so moving that readers will be happy to be swept away.”— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“This neo-gothic tale conjures a wicked form of therapy for BlackBerry-addicted urbanites. . . . Egan’s clever scenario presents Danny’s mental liberation as both thrilling and dangerous—imagination is the ultimate drug, she suggests—and the novel luxuriates in Wilkie Collins–style atmospherics.”— The New Yorker “A novel as daring as Jennifer Egan’s The Keep makes us think hard about one of the murkiest mysteries of all: the mystery of perception, that uncertain border where reality and imagination meet . . . irresistibly suspenseful. . . . A novel like The Keep shows us what it's like to live outside of today’s categories and to exist in unreal situations, in dreams, in confusion, in the experiences of others.”—Joanna Scott, The Los Angeles Times “Egan is an exceptionally intelligent writer whose joy at appropriating and subverting genres and clichés—from prison memoir to Gothic ghost story—is evident on every dizzyingly inventive page.”— The Washington Post “[A] remarkable piece of work. . . . Egan effectively echoes the works of Gothic writers such as Ann Radcliffe ( The Mysteries of Udolpho ) and Horace Walpole ( Castle of Otranto ), fusing a seemingly moribund genre with elements borrowed from the metafictions of John Barth, Italo Calvino and others. It's tricky; but it’s a trick only a terrifically talented writer could pull off.”— San Francisco Chronicle “If Kafka's Joseph K. and Lewis Carroll’s Alice had a son, he would have to be Jennifer Egan’s Danny. . . . No matter how many symbols and zany subplots she juggles . . . the novelist keeps the action moving and the irony biting.”— Boston Sunday Globe “Intelligent, intense and remarkably intuitive. . . . Jennifer Egan gives us the satisfying thunk of a fully understood if unexpected, kind of sense.”—Nan Goldberg, The New York Observer “It’s precisely Egan’s talent for tapping into the American subconscious—with deeply intuitive forays into the darker aspects of our technology–driven, image–saturated culture—that has established the author and journalist as a prescient literary voice.”— Vogue “Jennifer Egan spins a haunting tale. . . . Egan’s brilliance is in balancing the deliciously creepy elements of gothic–castle novels with the dead–on realism of a prisoner’s life, to create a book worth keeping.”—Elissa Schappell, Vanity Fair “Egan’s third novel . . . is a strange, clever, and always compelling meditation on the relationship between the imagination and the captivities (psychological, metaphysical, and even physical) of modern life.”— The Atlantic Monthly “Visionary . . . at once hyperrealistic and darkly dreamed. . . . With Egan’s powers of invention running at full tilt, The Keep reads like a twenty-first-century mash-up of Kafka, Calvino, and Poe, in which the absurd meets the surreal meet the unspeakable—to edgy, entertaining effect.”—Lisa Shea, Elle “Roiling and captivating. . . . As you finish this novel, part horror tale, part mystery, part romance, the mind lingers over it, amazed by how vivid Egan has made it, how witty, how disturbing, how credible, and yet how utterly fantastic.”—Vince Passaro, O, The Oprah Magazine “ The Keep is an example of literature responding to current events not with a mirror but an artful mindfuck.” —David Bahr, Time Out New York “With The Keep , Egan breaks the mold from page one. Her muscular, lively prose achieves a haunting effect. . . . [The book] maintains a frightening, vertiginous velocity. . . . And the immersion in these high-stakes psychological tightrope acts gives The Keep a page-turning horror. . . . Outstanding.”— The Onion “Egan gets everything right–from the convolutions of the strung-out male mind to the self-deceptions of a drug addict–and her skill will keep you marveling at the pages that you can’t help turning.”— People “Like an old spirit who refuses to go away, this is one fantasy that haunts long after its physical end.”— The Boston Phoenix “Egan is both a captivating storyteller and an incisive social observer. . . . The events that transpire are so surprising and provocative, the humor so wry, the sheer pleasure of reading The Keep so great, one instantly feels impelled to read it again, an impulse that is grandly rewarded, so masterful is Egan’s foreshadowing, so nuanced and mysterious is the story. Gothic and chthonic, The Keep is satirically sublime.”— The Chicago Tribune “Arresting . . . insightful and often funny, so fluid that you actually have the sensation of sinking into these lives . . . strange and beautifully drawn, a place well worth visiting.”—Susan Kelly, USA Today “Dazzling . . . a metafictional tour de force . . . it draws us in with its compelling realism as surely as anything by Dickens or Balzac—not to mention Henry James, who understood better than anyone how to turn the screw.”— Chicago Sun-Times “Steeped in Gothic mystery and plugged into our wired, up–to–the–minute cultures, The Keep is a hypnotic tale of unexpected connections between isolated people, each concealing secrets that ultimately upend how we see them. . . . Though dark with betrayal and violence (both psychological and literal), The Keep ultimately reveals itself to be a love letter to the creative impulse.”— Newsday “ The Keep is a novel of ideas.”— Poets & Writers “An engrossing narrative told in prose that’s remarkably fresh and inventive.”— Library Journal “Atmospheric and tense, this is a mesmerizing story.”— Booklist “Jennifer Egan is a contemporary American storyteller in the vein of Stephen King or The Sopranos scriptwriters. Her latest novel, a slightly gothic tale of love and the (possibly) supernatural, is a pleasure to read. . . . Egan’s eye and ear for contemporary America places the whole saga too close to home for fantasy.”—Emily Carter Roiphe, Minneapolis Star-Tribune “A dark and fascinating journey. . . . Egan skillfully builds the tension to a tipping point, culminating in an explosion. . . . The complicated plot comes together seamlessly, marvelously. . . . It’s a novel that engages and haunts the reader, a psychological who’s–who, who–dun–what and how–do–they–go–on. The Keep is a fast an furious read, a perfect summer novel.”— Rocky Mountain News “Egan . . . makes it all work. How she weaves the story of these four people together—and the unexpected links between them—is fascinating.”— The Oregonian “The book itself is a stronghold of imaginative story telling, the last stand of the Gothic novel.”— The Philadelphia Inquirer “Exhilarating . . . Context and borders shift and dissolve, and the reader experiences the precise frisson the gloomy genre of Gothic is meant to convey: the wonder, the terror and the trapped chill of fear that resolves in a mind-expanding realization of the dimensions within your own head. In a word: sublime.”—Linda Marotta, Fangoria “Part gothic romance, part ghost story, and peppered with Egan’s startling insights into the role of communication and loneliness in contemporary life, this is one brainy page-turner that will have you leaving the lights on at night.”— iVillage “ The Keep is a cinematic treat for the inner eye, moving as it does between the musty dungeons of an ancient power to a prison full of angry men and deep into the souls of the walking dead—those riddled with guilt, lust and loneliness.”— Santa Cruz Sentinel “ The Keep is imaginatively plotted and keeps you guessing until its final chapter. Far from seeming in any way contrived or dependent upon props or plot stratagems, Egan’s storytelling reaffirms the quality that defines ‘literary’ suspense.”— Pittsburgh Tribune-Review “Jennifer Egan’s The Keep is a page–turner.”— The Austin Chronicle “An addictive, clever story.”— The Register-Guard “A psychological drama inside a haunted house tale wrapped in a prison memoir that ne... Jennifer Egan is the author of Look at Me, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, The Invisible Circus, and the story collection Emerald City. Her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The castle was falling apart, but at 2 a.m. under a useless moon, Danny couldn’t see this. What he saw looked solid as hell: two round towers with an arch between them and across that arch was an iron gate that looked like it hadn’t moved in three hundred years or maybe ever. He’d never been to a castle before or even this part of the world, but something about it all was familiar to Danny. He seemed to remember the place from a long time ago, not like he’d been here exactly but from a dream or a book. The towers had those square indentations around the top that little kids put on castles when they draw them. The air was cold with a smoky bite, like fall had already come even though it was mid-August and people in New York were barely dressed. The trees were losing their leaves—Danny felt them landing in his hair and heard them crunching under his boots when he walked. He was looking for a doorbell, a knocker, a light: some way into this place or at least a way to find the way in. He was getting pessimistic. Danny had waited two hours in a gloomy little valley town for a bus to this castle that never frigging came before he looked up and saw its black shape against the sky. Then he’d started to walk, hauling his Samsonite and satellite dish a couple of miles up this hill, the Samsonite’s puny wheels catching on boulders and tree roots and rabbit holes. His limp didn’t help. The whole trip had been like that: one hassle after another starting with the red eye from Kennedy that got towed into a field after a bomb threat, surrounded by trucks with blinky red lights and giant nozzles that were comforting up until you realized their job was to make sure the fireball only incinerated those poor suckers who were already on the plane. So Danny had missed his connection to Prague and the train to wherever the hell he was now, some German-sounding town that didn’t seem to be in Germany. Or anywhere else—Danny couldn’t even find it online, although he hadn’t been sure about the spelling. Talking on the phone to his Cousin Howie, who owned this castle and had paid Danny’s way to help out with the renovation, he’d tried to nail down some details. Danny: I’m still trying to get this straight—is your hotel in Austria, Germany, or the Czech Republic? Howie: Tell you the truth, I’m not even clear on that myself. Those borders are constantly sliding around. Danny (thinking): They are? Howie: But remember, it’s not a hotel yet. Right now it’s just an old— The line went dead. When Danny tried calling back, he couldn’t get through. But his tickets came the next week (blurry postmark)—plane, train, bus—and seeing how he was newly unemployed and had to get out of New York fast because of a misunderstanding at the restaurant where he’d worked, getting paid to go somewhere else—anywhere else, even the fucking moon—was not a thing Danny could say no to. He was fifteen hours late. He left his Samsonite and satellite dish by the gate and circled the left tower (Danny made a point of going left when he had the choice because most people went right). A wall curved away from the tower into the trees, and Danny followed that wall until woods closed in around him. He was moving blind. He heard flapping and scuttling, and as he walked the trees got closer and closer to the wall until finally he was squeezing in between them, afraid if he lost contact with the wall he’d get lost. And then a good thing happened: the trees pushed right through the wall and split it open and gave Danny a way to climb inside. This wasn’t easy. The wall was twenty feet high, jagged and crumbly with tree trunks crushed into the middle, and Danny had a tricky knee from an injury connected to the misunderstanding at work. Plus his boots were not exactly made for climbing—they were city boots, hipster boots, somewhere between square-tipped and pointy—his lucky boots, or so Danny thought a long time ago, when he bought them. They needed resoling. The boots were skiddy even on flat city concrete, so the sight of Danny clawing and scrambling his way up twenty feet of broken wall was not a thing he would’ve wanted broadcast. But finally he made it, panting, sweating, dragging his sore leg, and hoisted himself onto a flat walkway-type thing that ran on top of the wall. He brushed off his pants and stood up. It was one of those views that make you feel like God for a second. The castle walls looked silver under the moon, stretched out over the hill in a wobbly oval the size of a football field. There were round towers every fifty yards or so. Below Danny, inside the walls, it was black—pure, like a lake or outer space. He felt the curve of big sky over his head, full of purplish torn-up clouds. The castle itself was back where Danny had started out: a clump of buildings and towers jumbled together. But the tallest tower stood off on its own, narrow and square with a red light shining in a window near the top. Looking down made something go easier in Danny. 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 came 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 also you could be seen , you knew and were known. Two-way recognition. Standing on the castle wall, Danny felt alto—the word was still with him after all these years, even though the friends were long gone. Grown up, probably. Danny wished he’d brought his satellite dish to the top of this wall. He itched to make some calls—the need felt primal, like an urge to laugh or sneeze or eat. It got so distracting that he slithered back down off the wall and backtracked through those same pushy trees, dirt and moss packed under his longish fingernails. But by the time he got back to the gate his alto was gone and all Danny felt was tired. He left the satellite dish in its case and found a flat spot under a tree to lie down. He made a pile out of leaves. Danny had slept outside a few times when things got rough in New York, but this was nothing like that. He took off his velvet coat and turned it inside out and rolled it into a pillow at the foot of the tree. He lay on the leaves faceup and crossed his arms over his chest. More leaves were coming down. Danny watched them spinning, turning against the half-empty branches and purple clouds, and felt his eyes start to roll back into his head. He was trying to come up with some lines to use on Howie— Like: Hey man, your welcome mat could use a little work. Or else: You’re paying me to be here, but I’m figuring you don’t want to pay your guests. Or maybe: Trust me, outdoor lighting is gonna rock your world. —just so he’d have some things to say if there was a silence. Danny was nervous about seeing his cousin after so long. The Howie he knew as a kid you couldn’t picture grown up—he’d been wrapped in that pear-shaped girl fat you see on certain boys, big love handles bubbling out of the back of his jeans. Sweaty pale skin and a lot of dark hair around his face. At age seven or eight, Danny and Howie invented a game they’d play whenever they saw each other at holidays and family picnics. Terminal Zeus it was called, and there was a hero (Zeus), and there were monsters and missions and runways and airlifts and bad guys and fireballs and high-speed chases. They could play anywhere from a garage to an old canoe to underneath a dining room table, using whatever they found: straws, feathers, paper plates, candy wrappers, yarn, stamps, candles, staples, you name it. Howie thought most of it up. He’d shut his eyes like he was watching a movie on the backs of his eyelids that he wanted Danny to see: Okay, so Zeus shoots Glow-Bullets at the enemy that make their skin light up so now he can see them through the trees and then— blam! —he lassos them with Electric Stunner-Ropes! Sometimes he made Danny do the talking—Okay, you tell it: what does the underwater torture dungeon look like?—and Danny would start making stuff up: rocks, seaweed, baskets of human eyeballs. He got so deep inside the game he forgot who he was, and when his folks said Time to go home the shock of being yanked away made Danny throw himself on the ground in front of them, begging for another half hour, please! another twenty minutes, ten, five, please, just one more minute, pleasepleaseplease? Frantic not to be ripped away from the world he and Howie had made. The other cousins thought Howie was weird, a loser, plus he was adopted, and they kept their distance: Rafe especially, not the oldest cousin but the one they all listened to. You’re so sweet to play with Howie, Danny’s mom would say. From what I understand, he doesn’t have many friends. But Danny wasn’t trying to be nice. He cared what his other cousins thought, but nothing could match the fun of Terminal Zeus. When they were teenagers, Howie changed— overnight was what everyone said. He had a traumatic experience and his sweetness drained away and he turned moody, anxious, always wiggling a foot and muttering King Crimson lyrics under his breath. He carried a notebook, even at Thanksgiving it was there in his lap with a napkin on it to catch the gravy drips. Howie made marks in that book with a flat sweaty pencil, looking around at different family members like he was trying to decide when and how they would... Read more