MADreads

Attempting the gothic

January 14th, 2008 Jim - South Madison

Jennifer Egan’s novel, The Keep, is a novel within a novel within a novel.  The novel at the center is an attempt to update the old, early 19th century gothic novel.  Which is a tall order, considering that these novels were never terribly plausible in their original form.  If memory serves, they typically featured wayward daughters defiantly seeking to elope with true loves against the wishes of tyrannical fathers.   I remember pages and pages of escape scenes, chases through tunnels, surprise reunions with mothers/brothers/cousins the daughter had presumed dead, and marriages based on true love and in defiance of the father.

Kind of hard to update?  It may be that Egan thought so since her update strays quite some distance from these plot elements.  Her faux gothic story involves cousins Howard and Danny whose shared outsider status forges a strong childhood bond between them.  That bond is ruptured when Danny does something nasty and life-threatening to Howard to gain the approval of a cool cousin.  Years later, Danny is down on his luck and in need of refuge. Having nowhere else to turn, Danny accepts Howard’s offer to help him turn a mysterious old castle in a remote corner of Eastern Europe into a resort. Danny suspects Howard’s motivation and fears he’s falling into a trap. But with few options he accepts.

There is no father-daughter combat, no marriage plot.  However, there is a castle, a mysterious princess in a tower, horrific acts of punishment and revenge, and lots of tunnels.  Like many old gothic novels, this story is about confinement: what does it mean, how can it be constituted?   Which is not surprising because, as the reader learns early on, the Howard/Danny story is being written by a lifer, Ray, taking a creative writing class.  Although Ray started the class to get out of his cell a couple of hours a week, he soon uses the class and the writing as a possible bridge to the woman teaching the class.

Egan’s book is a thoughtful exploration of the uses of stories, the way they can serve, reflect, and answer to the needs and circumstances of the teller.  That being said, The Keep does sometimes come off as a bit of a creative writing exercise gone amok.  I got the feeling that the reader is supposed to find the occasional clumsy plotting and purple prose in Ray’s telling comic.  I think Egan is offering it as a parody of the type of stuff churned out in creative writing classes.  However, she fails to the extent that Ray is a remarkably good story teller.  His style has a refreshing honesty, simplicity and engaging conversational quality to it.  Sure, there is some clumsy writing, obtrusive authorial intrusions, and over the top locutions in Ray’s telling; however, it doesn’t come off as the work of an amateur.  While it is interesting to go ‘behind the scenes’ and see the ways Ray has reworked the elements of his life into his story, it is the story he is telling that ultimately drove my interest.  A quick, suspensful and entertaining read.

Entry Filed under: Recreational Fiction, Thriller