Look at Me: A Novel

Look at Me: A Novel
by Jennifer Egan

Look at Me: A Novel
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Book Summary Information

Author: Jennifer Egan
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-10-08
ISBN: 0385721358
Number of pages: 544
Publisher: Anchor

Book Reviews of Look at Me: A Novel

Book Review: Identities Lost and Found
Summary: 5 Stars

"Look at Me," Jennifer Egan's intriguing, surrealistic sendup of American pop culture starts with an automobile accident and a shattered face in Rockford, IL, two women named Charlotte, and a return to New York, with its co-op apartments, its club scene, its New York Post, and its supermodels. Egan playfully sets the tale in "199_," but the dash could be only 7 or 8 or 9. As clearly the setting is the time of the Great Age of Dotcoms--so _not_ this era.

The older Charlotte is a 28-year-old-beauty (or anyway was before her face gets redone) who admits to having been born 35 years before the story takes place. She's a far from super fashion model who makes the playoffs but never gets to the final round (what she calls her "mirrored room") has her face repaired in Rockford (it now sports 80 titanium screws), her home town, and then returns to New York--to find nobody recognizes her anymore.

The younger Charlotte, 16, the daughter of the older Charlotte's high school friend, is an unconventionally troubled teen with an attitude, a brother who's being treated for leukemia, and a dotty uncle.

Also making an appearance are an alcoholic private detective and the mysterious Z, terrorist-math teacher, whose life takes a dramatic turn after he dines at a Micky D's.

Egan skillfully interweaves the story lines and creates some hilarious moments--among them a fashion photographer who finds a creative use for razors, perhaps the most bizarre attempted suicide in recent American literature, a reference to a tv documentary about the making of a "making of" movie, and a climactic attempt to re-create on film what is now Charlotte's (in)famous auto accident for an Internet Website, to which she has sold her very identity.

In an afterword, Egan mentions that she wrote the book between 1994 and 2001. So what seems like remembrance and reflection is actually prescience and prediction. It's quite an achievement.

Summary of Look at Me: A Novel

At the start of this edgy and ambitiously multilayered novel, a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes eighty titanium screws to reassemble it. She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied.

With the surreal authority of a David Lynch, Jennifer Egan threads Charlotte?s narrative with those of other casualties of our infatuation with the image. There?s a deceptively plain teenaged girl embarking on a dangerous secret life, an alcoholic private eye, and an enigmatic stranger who changes names and accents as he prepares an apocalyptic blow against American society. As these narratives inexorably converge, Look at Me becomes a coolly mesmerizing intellectual thriller of identity and imposture.

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