Synopses & Reviews
From National Book Award finalist Jennifer Egan, author of
Look at Me ("Brilliantly unnerving...A haunting, sharp, splendidly articulate novel"
The New York Times), a spellbinding work of literary suspense enacted in a chilling psychological landscape a dazzling tour de force.
Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank whose devastating consequences changed both their lives, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe, a castle steeped in blood lore and family pride. Built over a secret system of caves and tunnels, the castle and its violent history invoke and subvert all the elements of a gothic past: twins, a pool, an old baroness, a fearsome tower. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story a story about two cousins who unite to renovate a castle that brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.
Egan's relentlessly gripping page-turner plays with rich forms ghost story, love story, gothic and transfixing themes: the undertow of history, the fate of imagination in the cacophony of modern life, the uncanny likeness between communications technology and the supernatural. In a narrative that shifts seamlessly from an ancient European castle to a maximum security prison, Egan conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep the last stand, the final holdout, the place you run to when the walls are breached is both everything worth protecting and the very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive.
A novel of fierce intelligence and velocity; a bravura performance from a writer of consummate skill and style.
Review
"Atmospheric and tense, this is a mesmerizing story." Booklist
Review
"An engrossing narrative told in prose thats remarkably fresh and inventive." Library Journal
Review
"Intelligent, challenging and exciting....The characters' emotions are so real, the author's insights so moving, that readers will be happy to be swept away." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"It's precisely Egan's talent for tapping into the American subconscious...that has established the author and journalist as a prescient literary voice." Vogue
Review
"Egan is a very good writer, insightful and often funny, so fluid that you actually have the sensation of sinking into these lives." USA Today
Review
"How [Egan] weaves the story of these four people together and the unexpected links between them is fascinating." Oregonian
Review
"Overall, the improbability of The Keep is as bold as its realism is impassioned." Los Angeles Times
Review
"[A] work both prodigiously entertaining and profoundly moving." New York Times
Review
"[A] pleasure to read....Eagan's story unfolds in such sharp, realistically toned flashes that you get the information exactly the way her narrator wishes without even knowing you were looking for it." Minneapolis Star Tribune
Review
"While this ghost story wants to spook, instead it frustrates with a dual narrative arc that's unnecessary and pointless....[W]hen Egan belatedly attempts to fuse this mess into a cohesive coda, she fails miserably. (Grade: D)" Entertainment Weekly
Review
"If, like your reviewer, you are inclined to regard traditional Gothic tropes as silly...you may be inclined to skip Jennifer Egan's The Keep....You would, however, be making a mistake....Expertly stacking and unstacking and, in the end, ingeniously discarding the Russian dolls of her protagonists' worlds, Egan, in clear and often witty prose, spins a tale of old-fashioned grip that argues for the liberating effects of fantasy and, not unrelatedly, for the enduring significance of the shudder." Joseph O'Neill, The Atlantic Monthly (read the entire Atlantic Monthly review)
Synopsis
The author of Look at Me, a National Book Award finalist, returns with a brilliantly constructed work of intellectual suspense that takes on the lure of history, the cacophony of modern life, the power of the imagination, the meaning of escape, and the uncanny similarities between technology and the supernatural.
About the Author
Jennifer Egan is the author of Look at Me, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, The Invisible Circus, and the story collection Emerald City. Her nonfiction appears frequently in the New York Times Magazine. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.
Reading Group Guide
In
The Keep, two cousins whose lives have been haunted by an incident of childhood cruelty are reunited at a crumbling, centuries-old castle somewhere in Eastern Europe. Howard, retired from bond trading and fabulously rich at thirty-five, wants to turn the castle into an Internet-free resort where guests can rediscover their own imaginations. Danny has come because he ran into some violent trouble with his boss at a New York restaurant, and Howard has promised him a job for a while. It’s a sign of his desperate need to keep in touch with his New York life that Danny, an Internet and cell phone addict, has lugged a satellite dish with him to this remote place. In the castle’s keep, Danny meets an ancient baroness who refuses to leave even though Howard has bought the property, which has been the home of her family for centuries. In a surreal romantic interlude, the baroness tells Danny of the castle’s maze of underground tunnels and its ancient torture chamber, still fully equipped with instruments of pain.
Meanwhile, in a high-security prison a convicted murderer named Ray has joined a writing workshop, in part to escape, however briefly, from Davis, his psychotic cell mate. His writing teacher is Holly, a woman with crimes of her own on her conscience, who comes to the prison once a week and finds herself falling in love with Ray, whose story—the story of Danny and Howard—she finds full of creative promise.
As the two stories continually merge and separate, the two narrators’ voices compete for our attention, and the line between what’s real and what’s imagined gets harder to see. The Keep is a hall of mirrors, a bravura performance of the art of fiction that is both immensely readable and intellectually provocative.
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 (17–18)? 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 in The Believer 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.” 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 155 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” (18). Why does Ray respond so powerfully to Holly’s suggestion, despite the fact that “it was just figurative language” (19), 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” (58). 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” (148). 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” (43). 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” (44). 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” (130). 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” (83). 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” (99). 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 140–42, the paragraphs leading up to and immediately following the stabbing of Ray. What elements contribute to making 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?
In The Keep, two cousins whose lives have been haunted by an incident of childhood cruelty are reunited at a crumbling, centuries-old castle somewhere in Eastern Europe. Howard, retired from bond trading and fabulously rich at thirty-five, wants to turn the castle into an Internet-free resort where guests can rediscover their own imaginations. Danny has come because he ran into some violent trouble with his boss at a New York restaurant, and Howard has promised him a job for a while. It’s a sign of his desperate need to keep in touch with his New York life that Danny, an Internet and cell phone addict, has lugged a satellite dish with him to this remote place. In the castle’s keep, Danny meets an ancient baroness who refuses to leave even though Howard has bought the property, which has been the home of her family for centuries. In a surreal romantic interlude, the baroness tells Danny of the castle’s maze of underground tunnels and its ancient torture chamber, still fully equipped with instruments of pain.
Meanwhile, in a high-security prison a convicted murderer named Ray has joined a writing workshop, in part to escape, however briefly, from Davis, his psychotic cell mate. His writing teacher is Holly, a woman with crimes of her own on her conscience, who comes to the prison once a week and finds herself falling in love with Ray, whose story—the story of Danny and Howard—she finds full of creative promise.
As the two stories continually merge and separate, the two narrators’ voices compete for our attention, and the line between what’s real and what’s imagined gets harder to see. The Keep is a hall of mirrors, a bravura performance of the art of fiction that is both immensely readable and intellectually provocative.
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 (17–18)? 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 in The Believer 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.” 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 155 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” (18). Why does Ray respond so powerfully to Holly’s suggestion, despite the fact that “it was just figurative language” (19), 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” (58). 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” (148). 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” (43). 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” (44). 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” (130). 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” (83). 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” (99). 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 140–42, the paragraphs leading up to and immediately following the stabbing of Ray. What elements contribute to making 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?
Author Q&A
Q: What gave you the idea to write about a gothic castle in central Europe? Your descriptions are so evocative, was there a trip or an actual place that inspired you or was this more the traditionally-imagined style of scary place, a la Nosferatu?A: There actually was a "moment of inspiration" for this book. It happened in the winter of 2001, right after I finished Look at Me but had no idea what I would work on next. My husband, who directs plays, had a job in Charleville, France, so we packed up our 8-week-old son and headed over there. My husband was working pretty constantly, and we ended up only having one day to explore our surroundings together. We drove to Bouillon, Belgium, which is where the first Crusade began, led by Godfrey de Bouillon. Godfrey’s ruined castle still stands on a high hill overlooking the town, and we went up there and stumped around in the mud and through lots of damp dark chambers, one of which had some instruments of torture in it. I was transfixed. I felt like there was electric current running through my body, but I wasn’t sure what it meant: that I wanted to write a biography of Godfrey de Bouillon? Probably not. That I wanted to write a novel set in medieval times? Maybe, but that seemed like a tall order for someone with a newborn baby and very little time to do heavy research. I mulled over my reaction to the castle for many months after that visit, and finally decided that what really interested me was the atmosphere of that ruin—the slightly cheesy nostalgia I’d felt for some imagined Medieval past. In other words, a gothic sensibility.
That being said, the castle I describe in The Keep is not Godfrey’s castle per se—it’s more generic. I did a fair amount of reading about castle architecture, and at one point I considered trying to draw, or have someone else draw, a floor plan of the castle in The Keep, but in the end I felt that I wanted it to be unknowable in some way—more a literary construct than an actual place.
Q: This story has some classic atmospheric ghost-story elements to it: were there any literary influences for that aspect, or do you have any favorites?
A: I loved the idea of using some classic gothic elements in this book: an old moldering structure; the possibility of supernatural activity; the sense of being cut off from the “real world”; twins; books inside books; a “found” manuscript. I read a fair amount of gothic literature, and found that I particularly enjoyed the 18th and very early 19th century stuff: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, The Monk by Matthew Lewis, The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe, Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin. These books are really crazy out somewhat of control from a literary standpoint, which seemed to suit the gothic genre very well. That being said, I think the most perfect gothic work I’ve read is Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw.
Q: There’s a recurrent theme about the power relationships between people, such as the one between the two main characters who are cousins, Howie and Danny, which reaches back to their adolescence and an act of supreme cruelty. Is this a theme that greatly interests you?
A: I’m not sure power relationships per se have interested me before The Keep, but they came to in the writing of this book. I write pretty unconsciously, with little sense as I begin a first draft of what will end up on the page or what I'll do with it. As I was writing the character of Danny, I found that he was obsessed with power, and moreover that he believed his obsession with power would lead to his having power. This linked up with one of my central preoccupations in The Keep, which is where to place our disembodied communication (cell phones, internet), which occupies more and more time, on the spectrum of real to unreal. For example, a person can feel, through telecommunications, an extraordinary sense of power and reach—a sense of being intimately linked to many people all over the world. But looked at another way, they may be isolated and disconnected. So are they powerful or not? Danny embodies that question.
Q: This book is also a wonderful meditation on the art of writing itself and the use of the imagination, particularly in the simultaneous story of prisoners in a fiction-writing class. Do you believe in the power of the imagination to change lives and was it difficult to write about the art of writing? Have you, like the character Holly who teaches writing to the inmates, ever taught writing?
A: I have taught writing, though I can’t claim to have revolutionized anyone’s life or perspective with my teachings, as Holly does. To tell you the truth, I was a little surprised by the affirming note this novel ends on; in some sense it really is a paean to the imagination, but I didn’t set out to write that. I began The Keep with an interest in the way the internet has made so much of our experience imaginary—we aren’t dealing with actual people, just people we conjure up in our own minds and then react to. But I ended up feeling that our ability to invent worlds and describe them in words—to tell stories—is one of the most thrilling aspects of our humanity: it gives us the power to build, to escape, to transform ourselves. Back to the idea of power, I ended up feeling that our imagination is the most basic, inviolable locus of power in each of us. It’s also a source of danger; when our inventive tools turn against us, we become paranoid, and the whole world is our enemy. At which point we can become quite aggressive in our efforts to defend ourselves from it.
Q: The character of Danny, the downtown New York 30-something, is a keen observer of life, always registering his sensory impressions, but also described as having “invisible skills” like detecting instantly who in a room has power and possessing a certain radar that lets him know how to talk to anyone. Qualities that are also useful to a novelist. Did you relate much to his or to any other character?
A: I tend not to write about myself or people like me if I can help it. This is partly because I don’t like the feeling of being exposed, but more, it’s because I like to escape from my own life as I write. So I didn’t imagine Danny as having a novelist’s sensibility quite, though now that you put it that way, I realize that my connection to him is through his alert, observational tendencies. I felt a kind of hilarious affection for Danny, because he’s so self deceiving; in a sense, he’s bet his life so far on the mistaken belief that proximity to powerful people is power, a little like a child who thinks that because he’s at a grown-up party, he’s a grown-up. I was interested in that brand of intractable childishness, and I wondered whether telecommunications technology, especially the internet, makes it possible to fool oneself with fantasies of adult life as a substitute for actually growing up. And that’s something I can’t relate to personally, because I’m 43—part of the last generation of people to grow up without a computer. I didn’t touch one until I was in college.
Q: How was it writing from the perspective of men? Were there unexpected challenges involved?
A: I loved it, for the reason I mentioned above: I don’t like writing about myself or people like me. And what better way to avoid it than to write from a male point of view—or, as it turned out, from the point of view of a man writing about a man? I’d been edging toward it for a while in short stories, which I often use to explore technical issues before I tackle them in a long form. I found it surprisingly easy to write as a man, but I didn’t trust those instincts; I’ve read novels written by men from a female perspective that were laughably off, and I didn’t want to make that mistake. I was thrilled when male readers found the manuscript credible.
Another advantage of writing from the perspective of not just a man but a decidedly non-literary man, was that it gave me a chance to move away from lyricism. That was something I’d been wanting to do for a while. I felt tired of pretty writing, full of lovely sounds and apt metaphors. I wanted something completely different, a voice that would never try to say anything beautifully, but would instead have to struggle to say it at all. Any beauty would have to come about by accident. I found that incredibly freeing—a release from a more lyrical sensibility.
Q: Another theme in the book is about the not-so-great need to be plugged in constantly to modern technology: cell phones, the internet, satellite dishes, and the disembodied and fractured nature of this kind of communication. In a perhaps-related thought, Danny observes about the castle: “[he had] a weird impression that the long-ago past was in perfect shape, but the closer you got to today the more things collapsed into this ruined state.” Do you feel this at all true of our modern world?
A: I have huge worries about the modern world, particularly our ability to destroy ourselves either slowly, by poisoning our environment, or quickly through weaponry. But I’m wary of the myth that things were better before—it’s too easy. Would I have wanted to live before the time of antibiotics? Before women could vote or hold most kinds of jobs? I don’t think so. That being said, I was curious in The Keep, as in Look at Me, about the degree to which technology has changed us internally, as human beings. Is the human experience qualitatively different for a person who exchanges a hundred emails and fifty phone calls a day, than for a person who wrote letters by hand and waited days or weeks for a response, inhabiting an environment that was silent unless another person was in the room with them? I’ll never know, of course, but those kinds of questions fascinate me.
Q: The language/dialogue in the book has, at times, a distinctly and delightfully popular feel to it, as well as a lot of humor: was it fun to write in that vernacular?
A: It was incredibly fun. I’ve moved more and more toward humor in my work, I’m not sure why. The big question in The Keep was whether a book could be funny and scary at the same time. I couldn’t think of other books that had made me feel both those things, and I’ll be curious to see how readers think I fared in The Keep. As for the vernacular speech, I was
interested in letting gothic nostalgia collide with Danny’s contemporary sensibility, because the two seemed so irreconcilable. The gothic environment is traditionally about being cut off. I think a lot of the humor in the book arises from the juxtaposition of hipster
connectedness with spooky remoteness.
Q: This is a much-different novel than your previous one, Look at Me. Did you make much of a conscious effort to go in an entirely different direction?
A: It wasn’t a conscious effort, but that seems to be the pattern for me. I work a long time on my books, and I tend to feel that I’ve exhausted a particular direction by the time I finish one. My first novel, The Invisible Circus, is steeped in nostalgia for the 1960s, which I felt very keenly growing up in San Francisco in the seventies. I didn’t think I could ever exhaust that nostalgia in myself, but when I finished that book it was gone. For Look at Me, I was taken with the idea of writing a slightly futuristic satire about the impact of image culture on millennial America. Having finished that, I found myself wanting to move into a more imaginary, consciously literary environment—hence the setting of The Keep. I still wanted to explore contemporary issues, but without having to contend with a particular time or place. And having set those parameters, I basically guaranteed that it would be nothing like Look at Me.
I should say that for me, one of the hardest things about beginning a new novel is settling on the right voice for it. The voice of the previous novel is still with me at first, but it’s an annoying holdover, useless to render up the entirely different world I’m trying to create. Once I’ve found the new voice, which comes about after many months of trial and error and banging my head against the wall, then I’m able to move more easily into the new work.
Q: Are you working on anything new yet?
A: I’m researching a new novel, which I think will be set in New York right after World War II. The timing and specificity of that choice suggests that it will have little in common with The Keep, or with any of my earlier novels. I can’t imagine anything remotely gothic happening in this new one. Having enjoyed partaking of that atmosphere for a while, I feel sated, and ready to move on to something completely different—which will require a new voice and technical skills I may not yet possess in order to be fully realized.