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Understanding Jennifer Egan by Alexander Moran

2022; University of North Texas Press; Volume: 54; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sdn.2022.0010

1934-1512

Ivan Kreilkamp,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Reviewed by: Understanding Jennifer Egan by Alexander Moran Ivan Kreilkamp MORAN, ALEXANDER. Understanding Jennifer Egan. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021. 139 pp. $59.99 hardcover; $19.99 paperback; $18.99 e-book. Novelist Jennifer Egan is likely still primarily known to most readers for two novels: 2010's prismatic A Visit from the Goon Squad—which swept up a range of major prizes, including the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award—and her follow-up to that book, 2017's Manhattan Beach, a more traditional, realist historical novel set during World War Two in New York City. (Her new novel, The Candy House, apparently a sequel of sorts to Goon Squad, is due out in April 2022.) Alexander Moran's Understanding Jennifer Egan—part of the University of South Carolina Press's Understanding Contemporary American Literature series—aims to canonize Egan as one of our major contemporary authors by embedding these two works in a broader context of all of Egan's writing to date, especially her previous works of fiction: her short story collection Emerald City (1993), debut novel The Invisible Circus (1994), and her subsequent two novels, Look at Me (2001) and The Keep (2006). Moran offers a reliably intelligent and insightful consideration of her full body of work—also attending to her prolific nonfictional essays and journalism—that convincingly draws out a number of patterns, preoccupations, and other through lines of her writing. Moran begins with the point that Egan has until recently "been largely absent from discussions of literary trends," "mentioned in footnotes or lists rather than at the center of debates" (1). He proposes interestingly that her work has often been "treated as a byword for excellence rather than analysis," suggesting the possibility that a reputation for a certain kind of consistent "excellence" might, in some respects, weigh against the sort of more sustained, questioning critical interpretation that is a prerequisite for truly canonical status. One might speculate that there are issues of audience at play here (has Egan been viewed as offering too-consistent satisfaction to a mainstream or even middlebrow readership?), as well as of gender (along similar lines), and of genre or category (her books' variety and range may have made her difficult to place)—among other factors. As Moran points out, however, Egan has recently begun to receive more sustained critical attention; PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association of America, devoted a roundtable to Manhattan Beach in 2019, and Moran's book joins this reviewer's (A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread, Columbia UP, 2021) as one of the first two book-length studies of the author. Moran's most sustained line of analysis concerns the prominence throughout Egan's work of depictions of "experiences of authenticity, particularly in regard to tourism, technology, genre, and memory" (6). Egan is especially "interested in how authenticity is managed, controlled, and staged" (6), a topic Moran analyzes in relation [End Page 129] to sociologist Dean MacCannell's concept of "staged authenticity." Parting ways with critics who read Egan's work as evincing a straightforward desire to recapture a lost authenticity, Moran rather stresses the ways this value tends to be "staged" or marked as contrived. So, both an early story—"Why China?"—and The Invisible Circus dwell on tourism as staged (17, 38), and Look At Me depicts a twenty-first-century image world as "simulacra" and "pseudo-event" (51): in that novel, "modeling is shown to be a staged form of womanhood, where every aspect is managed and framed" (24). In both Egan's neo-Gothic novel The Keep (76) and the safari chapter of Goon Squad (93), Moran similarly stresses the staged or managed authenticity of the tourist experience; and while he, like most critics, views Manhattan Beach as offering a partial departure from Egan's emphasis on the staged authenticities of our post-modern image world, he still sees that novel as conforming to the larger pattern in its pastiche of 1940s New York City and of several genres including noir, the seafaring novel, and historical fiction. Moran thus in effect defends Manhattan Beach against certain criticisms of it as a not-entirely...