The Keep
Jennifer Egan, 2006
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400079742
Summary
Two cousins, devastated by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a castle in Eastern Europe. The fortress has a bloody history that stretches back hundreds of years. Amid extreme paranoia and eerie silence, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results.
And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a third party — a prisoner, jailed for an unnamed crime—recounts an unforgettable story that brings the crimes of the past and present into stunning alignment. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 7, 1962
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Raised—San Francisco, California
• Education—University of Pennsylvania; Cambridge
University (UK)
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize; National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, New York
Jennifer Egan is an American novelist and short story writer who lives in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, New York City. She is perhaps best known for her 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won both the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
Background/early career
Egan was born in Chicago, Illinois, but grew up in San Francisco, California. She majored in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and, as an undergrad, dated Steve Jobs, who installed a Macintosh computer in her bedroom. After graduating from Penn, Egan spent two years at St John's College at Cambridge University, supported by a Thouron Award.
In addition to her several novels (see below), Egan has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, among other periodicals. Her journalism appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She also published a short-story collection in 1993.
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Egan has been hesitant to classify her most noted work, A Visit from the Goon Squad, as either a novel or a short story collection, saying,
I wanted to avoid centrality. I wanted polyphony. I wanted a lateral feeling, not a forward feeling. My ground rules were: every piece has to be very different, from a different point of view. I actually tried to break that rule later; if you make a rule then you also should break it!
The book features genre-bending content such as a chapter entirely formatted as a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Of her inspiration and approach to the work, she said,
I don’t experience time as linear. I experience it in layers that seem to coexist.… One thing that facilitates that kind of time travel is music, which is why I think music ended up being such an important part of the book. Also, I was reading Proust. He tries, very successfully in some ways, to capture the sense of time passing, the quality of consciousness, and the ways to get around linearity, which is the weird scourge of writing prose.
Bibliography (partial)
Novels
1995 - The Invisible Circus
2001 - Look at Me
2006 - The Keep
2010 - A Visit from the Goon Squad
2017 - Manhattan Beach
Short fiction
1993 - Emerald City (short story collection; released in US in 1996)
2012 - "Black Box" (short story, released on The New Yorker's Twitter account)
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/3/2017.)
Book Reviews
Egan shares [John] Fowles’s unusual gift for transporting the reader into a world where magical thinking actually works. In Egan’s case it also counts for something real, durable and concrete. The result is a work both prodigiously entertaining and profoundly moving. Ray’s motives for inventing this tale are mostly left to the reader’s inference; what he and Egan show in the end is that art and the imagination are the most powerful means of healing.
Madison Smartt Bell - New York Times
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.
Publishers Weekly
Egan's first work after National Book Award finalist Look at Me relates the story of aimless Danny, whose only talent is being in the right place at the right time and knowing the right people. He's so intent on maintaining this sense of supreme cool-which he calls alto-that he drags a satellite dish all the way to central Europe, where rich cousin Howie has bought a castle he plans to turn into a hotel. Howie is looking for a little alto of his own and wants Danny's help, never mind the ancient baroness hanging on heartlessly in the castle's keep. Soon, echoes of the past set Danny's head spinning, and he thinks Howie is out to revenge a nasty childhood prank. The histories of other people get layered in as well: there's Ray, who's writing Danny's story from a jail cell and whose connection to the events emerges slowly, and Holly, the prison writing instructor with a past. Their stories enhance Danny's, but they're not as developed and don't fit in so smoothly, somewhat roughing up the narrative arc toward the end. Yet the novel can be recommended for most collections as an engrossing narrative told in prose that's remarkably fresh and inventive. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
Two cousins linked by a shameful secret, a convicted murderer and a reformed meth freak are unlikely co-conspirators in this adventurous new novel by Egan (Look at Me, 2001, etc.). Aging party boy Danny is uneasy at the castle recently purchased by his cousin Howie in a remote area of central Europe. True, a "misunderstanding" with some very tough customers made it imperative to get out of New York City, and his cousin sent him a ticket. But has Howie really forgiven Danny for abandoning him in an underground cave when they were teenagers, a trauma that led him to drugs and crime? Well, maybe, since Howie eventually became a bond trader rich enough to retire at 34 and dream of turning the castle into a unique kind of hotel. "Let people be tourists of their own imaginations," he says, explaining that the castle will be free of all electronic distractions. Danny, who panics without his cell phone and Internet connection, is incredulous; when Howie says, "Imagination! It saved my life," his guilty cousin is sure he's making reference to that fateful day in the cave. No sooner are we immersed in this intriguing setup than the author pulls back to reveal that it's the creation of Ray, who's taking a writing course to kill time in jail. This storytelling strategy is hard to pull off, since one tale is almost always more interesting than the other, but Egan's characterizations and plotting are so strong that we're eager to find out where both sets of protagonists are heading even before it becomes clear that Ray is describing something that actually happened to him. As the focus shifts once again, this time to Ray's teacher Holly, all the narrative strands come together to underscore the theme Egan movingly delineates throughout: the power of art to transform even the most twisted and hopeless lives. There are a few slow spots, and the beautiful prose doesn't entirely disguise how wildly improbable the novel's events are, but the characters' emotions are so real, the author's insights so moving, that readers will be happy to be swept away. Intelligent, challenging and exciting.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What happens when you discover that Danny, in whose story we are immersed from the opening pages, is actually a character in the story being written by Ray, who is in prison [pp. 18–19]? As you proceed, does your involvement in both Danny’s story and Ray’s story remain equal, or does one plot become primary and the other secondary? How does Egan navigate the transitions between these two plots?
2. Jennifer Egan said in an interview that The Keep arose from a visit to a medieval castle. “The revelation was: This is something new to me, something different. I just want to be here for a while. I want this feeling. And for me, that sense of time and place—of atmosphere—predates a character, a story, everything else except a few abstract notions that I want to explore [The Believer, August 2000].” Consider how the setting and situation affect you in the opening chapters. What is the feeling they evoke? How does Danny’s very modern voice affect your response?
3. Guilt plays a large role in the lives of several self-destructive characters in The Keep. How does guilt for past actions shape the present lives of Danny and Holly?
4. The Gothic novel is a genre that emerged in the eighteenth century with Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto. Gothic novels often included crumbling ruins, dark secrets, imprisoned heroines, hidden passages, and so on. Why does Ray choose to write a modern Gothic novel, and how do elements like the castle, the baroness, and the drowned twins resonate against the hyper-modernity of the information age that Danny has so reluctantly left behind?
5. What does the catalog of Danny’s scars and injuries tell us about him? Is he particularly accident prone? Does Danny’s character change over the course of the story?
6. Danny is officially disconnected from his known world when his satellite dish, laboriously carried from Manhattan, falls into the castle’s “Imagination Pool.” Why is this funny? What are some of the other comic scenes in the novel?
7. The series of questions that arises on page 158 is one of the frequent reminders that Danny’s story is being written by a novice. Ray becomes inspired to take writing seriously when Holly tells the class to notice all the locked doors and gates surrounding them. She says, “My job is to show you a door you can open. And she taps the top of her head.” Though Ray is skeptical about Holly’s “cheesy motivational speech,” he feels “something pop in [his] chest” [p. 20]. Why does Ray respond so powerfully to Holly’s suggestion, despite the fact that “it was just figurative language” [p. 20], as he says?
8. The Keep allows us to watch the process of someone becoming a writer. Ray listens to “ghost words” from his fellow convicts’ former lives, writing them down “because every one has the DNA of a whole life in it, a life where those words fit in and made sense.... I save up those words and later on I open up the notebook where I’m keeping the journal Holly told us all to keep and I write them down one by one. And for some reason that puts me in a good mood, like money in the bank” [p. 61]. What does this suggest about close observation, words, and meaning in daily life?
9. The Keep is filled with imagery of doors, windows, towers, tunnels, and stairways. Characters climb in, climb out, explore, are locked in, emerge into the light. Why is this imagery used so consistently, and whose imagination is creating or projecting it? Another major image is the pool: “There was the pool: round, quiet, black. The Imagination Pool” [p. 155]. How are these symbolic elements related to one another?
10. Drug use plays a significant role in the story, with Mick, Danny, Holly, Ray, and many of the prisoners all having been serious addicts or occasional users. How is drug use related to the main ideas in the novel? Can drug use be seen as a corollary to writing in the ways it alters perception and reality?
11. Howard is drawn to the castle because of “the feel of it. All this...history pushing up from underneath” [p. 46]. He goes on to say that in the distant past, “people were constantly seeing ghosts, having visions—they thought Christ was sitting with them at the dinner table, they thought angels and devils were flying around.... Was everyone nuts in medieval times? Doubtful. But their imaginations were more active. Their inner lives were rich and weird” [p. 47]. Later he asks, “What’s real, Danny? Is reality TV real?...Who are you talking to on your cell phone? In the end you have no fucking idea. We’re living in a supernatural world, Danny. We’re surrounded by ghosts” [p. 137]. The baroness tells Danny, “Before my time there were eighty generations of von Ausblinkers whose blood now runs in my veins, and they built this castle and lived and fought and died in it. Now their bodies are dust—they’re part of the soil and the trees and even the air we’re breathing this very minute, and I am all of those people. They’re inside me. They are me. There is no separation between us” [p. 88]. This idea of feeling or seeing or hearing ghosts is central to The Keep. How do you interpret the meaning or meanings of “ghosts” in these and other conversations?
12. Can writing—and the imagination—be redemptive? Ray is serving time for murder; yet as he presents himself to us, it’s difficult to detect any evil in him. Is he a reliable narrator, or not? Is he a likable and even lovable character? Is Holly a reliable judge of character, and does her love for Ray influence your feelings about him?
13. Davis’s shoebox full of dust is a radio that can hear the voices of the dead; he sees this radio as having the same function as Ray’s manuscript: “All this time we’ve been doing the same thing: picking up ghosts. We’re in lockstep, brother. We’re like twins” [p. 106]. How is writing like Davis’s radio? Davis’s comment about himself and Ray as twins is also significant. What is important about this idea of twins, and how might it also include other characters in the novel? Which characters seem to be doubles or shadows of each other?
14. In their shared obsession with castles, dungeons, and the seductive powers of the imagination, are Danny and Howard both interested in reliving their pasts? Does the past return? Does Danny redeem himself for what Danny did to Howard when they were boys?
15. Can you imagine visiting a hotel such as Howard’s? Might the principles underlying the hotel actually be attractive to busy people in the world we now live in? Does Howard’s real power lie not in his money, but in his belief in the imagination, and possibly in his ability to provoke people to change their lives? Is The Keep in part a serious critique of American culture’s obsession with superficiality and the distractions of the moment?
16. Reread pages 148–149, the paragraphs leading up to and immediately following the stabbing of Ray. What elements make this writing so powerful?
17. The Keep tells the stories of three main protagonists: Danny, Ray, and Holly. Whose story is most compelling, and why? Does the final chapter resolve or leave unsettled your understanding of the relationship between these characters? What happens to the two distinct plots—the story of Ray and the story of Danny—at the end of the novel? What happens when Holly dives into the pool in the final scene?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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