Brief note: The Keep

Jennifer Egan's novel-within-a-novel, The Keep, has three narrative tracks: there's Ray, the murderer writing a novel for his jailhouse creative writing class, whose voice occasionally intrudes into the limited third person POV of "his" novel's narrator; there's Danny, the protagonist of Ray's novel, who goes abroad to help his cousin renovate a decrepit castle; and there's Holly, Ray's creative writing teacher (who remains a figment of Ray's consciousness until the final pages).  Near the beginning, an irate Holly tells Ray that "[t]here's the door [...] Why don't you just walk out?" (18) and all three narratives explore the literal and figurative ramifications of that question.  Characters spend most of their time being trapped (in prison, in dungeons, in drug addiction, in bad relationships, in caves) and looking for exits.  Very predictably, the novel proposes that the creative power of language constitutes one form of exit, and in a moment of apparent magical realism near the end, Ray's novel seems to produce the castle about which he's writing.*  Egan juxtaposes Danny's frantic electronic connectedness to writing and dreaming in isolation; the former produces endless, frequently meaningless bursts of text which signal a real lack of connection, as in the messages that Danny sends without expecting an answer (65), while the latter reshapes both stories and the world.    Audiences are important in this novel, but Egan nevertheless insists that artists need solitary spaces in which to work--even if that space has to be a prison.

I was a little frustrated by Egan's novel of surfaces, Look at Me, and I continue to be frustrated here.  The novel's main argument about the liberatory power of language is, for lack of a better word, safe.  The reader expects that the characters will discover how to free themselves through speech (not to mention some creative thinking on the part of Ray and his cellmate), and...they do.   Even the hidden joke of Ray's novel, in which the plot coyly lays out Ray's final plans, makes a conventional, detective novel-type point about how readers interpret clues.   It's disappointing to find the novel ending there, because the narrative is much more interesting when it suggests that literature's work on the audience can be anarchic, unpredictable.  Ray's story leaves his fellow prisoners in suspense, which leads to one of them complaining that he "feel[s] bad not knowing" (59)--before he charges across the room and assaults Ray (61).  Later on, Ray's refusal to acknowledge the power of another prisoner's story so enrages the other man that he stabs Ray and nearly kills him (141).  Storytelling doesn't just produce a kind of disinterested pleasure; it creates resistance, powerful feeling, anger, joy, love, and deadly hate.  Egan's novel is at its liveliest when it explores just what powerful fictions do to both their readers and their writers, without tipping over into either the Don Quixote anti-romance tradition or a rah-rah "fiction as the Great Escape" mode.       

*--A reading which depends on how you assess the "autobiographical" component of Ray's novel, I should point out. 

Comments

[Flora]

Dear LP, I, too, found the novel to be frustrating for many of your reasons, but also for the fact that its gothic elements seem superimposed on the text merely to add another layer to the story of Danny's betrayal of his cousin. No one feels too deeply and everyone, except for Danny, comes out all right. Quasi-gothic? Pseudo-gothic? PoMo gothic? The power of Danny's story for the other prisoners seems to rely very heavily on the question of its truth or fiction, but in itself it is not that compelling. The truly disturbing events happen...and then are gone,don't matter. And finally, the too neat balance of cave and underground tunnels was too much for me. While I enjoyed reading this novel, I did wish it had a little more depth, and a few more consequences for the characters.

[Josh]

LP, I don't agree with that "until the final pages" --I think the novel's coda is also written by Ray.

[Miriam]

Josh: I can buy that argument...