Look at Me
A Novel
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3.7 • 112 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • In this ambitiously multilayered novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Jennifer Egan published Look at Me way back in 2001, but this thoughtful thriller is perfect for the age of Instagram. Following a catastrophic car crash, model Charlotte Swenson is rendered unrecognizable, viewed as a stranger in her old Manhattan haunts. Charlotte decides to use her new anonymity to outrun her troubled past—until an encounter with a tormented private investigator saddles her with a whole different kind of fame. We won’t spoil the strange, chilling turns Egan’s story takes, but suffice it to say that issues of image and identity are at the center of Charlotte’s increasingly disturbing journey. With Egan’s trademark smarts, Look at Me is more than a take on celebrity culture’s fixation with appearances: It’s a tense, compelling critique of beauty itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Equipped with an arresting premise, Egan's hip and haunting second novel (after The Invisible Circus) gets off to a promising start. Thirty-five-year-old Charlotte, a thoroughly unpleasant Manhattan-based model who escaped the middle-class nothingness of her upbringing in Rockford, Ill., then spent her adult life getting by on appearances, literally loses her face in a catastrophic car accident back in Rockford. As Charlotte's rebuilt face heals and she goes unrecognized at the restaurants and nightclubs that were her old haunts, she must grapple with the lives and losses she has tried to outrun a fractured childhood friendship, the fianc she betrayed and "Z," a suspicious man from an unidentified Middle Eastern country. Anthony Halliday, an attractive, tormented private investigator, interrupts Charlotte's isolation. Hired by a pair of nightclub owners to track down Z because he absconded with a pile of their money, Halliday carries the scent of romance, but he also kicks off a chain of introductions that bizarrely lands Charlotte in the "mirrored room" of great fame. She is reconnected with her past at the same time that she becomes part of a brave new Internet world, where identity itself is a consumable commodity. Oddly, this narrative alternates with that of her old friend Ellen's daughter (also named Charlotte), whose life in Rockford centers around two older men. Though expertly constructed and seductively knowing, Egan's tale is marred by the overblown trendiness at its core. Charlotte (the model, who progresses from horrid to just bearable by the end) and the others come to the same realization: a world ruled by the consumerist values bred by mass production and mass information is "a world constructed from the outside in." The Buddha said it better. National advertising; author tour.FYI:Egan's writing appears in publications like the New Yorker andHarper's, andThe Invisible Circus was recently made into a film featuring Cameron Diaz.
