Look at Me
By Jennifer Egan
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 415 pages, $24.95
`We are what we see,’ proclaims one of the desperate characters in “Look at Me,” Jennifer Egan’s second novel.” `Forget what happened,’ “says another.” ‘This is what happened, and it hasn’t even happened yet! It can happen any way we want!’ “
These pronouncements combine to form the novel’s double vision: Image is everything, but image is chimera, dependent not only on the eyes of a universe of beholders, but on the manipulations of a universe of spin doctors and style mavens and Madison Avenue pitchmen. What we see — what we are — may be inherently corrupt in a culture in which image has become its own reality. “Look at Me” is not a comfortable novel — it’s too easy to recognize our People-magazine-reading, chat-room-lurking selves in its pages — but its funhouse perspective on culture and identity makes itself felt.
Egan, who has her share of splenetic fun with this material, gives us fashion model Charlotte Swenson as the major-point-of-view character. Charlotte’s career in New York is on a downward spiral even before she drives out of the city with a mysterious man called Z. He instructs her to head for ” ‘America. The heart. I haven’t seen it.’ ” Charlotte, who put what soul she once had into fleeing the heartland, obeys because she understands that a “story was unfolding.” The two of them are 20 miles from Charlotte’s despised hometown of Rockford, Ill., when Z jumps out of the car and Charlotte’s face collides with the BMW’s shatterproof windshield:
“In my memory, the accident has acquired a harsh, dazzling beauty: white sunlight, a slow loop through space like being on the Tilt-A-Whirl . . . feeling my body move faster than, and counter to, the vehicle containing it. Then a bright, splintering crack as I burst through the windshield into the open air, bloody and frightened and uncomprehending.”
In fact, Charlotte’s memory is manufactured. She was knocked unconscious on impact, pulled from a cornfield by a good Samaritan who, with un-American modesty, called for help and disappeared. But her willingness — her need — to rewrite history presages the novel to come. After almost a year of painful recovery, with 80 titanium screws holding together the shattered bones of her face, Charlotte leaves Rockford to return to New York. Her face is healed, but in the image-conscious center of the world, she has become “more difficult to see,” even by herself. She has pictures of herself before the accident, of course, but only good ones.
And bad pictures, Charlotte now understands, are “the only ones that could show you what you actually looked like. I would have killed for one.” In her old life, being observed was enough for Charlotte; it “felt like an action, the central action-the only one worth taking.” Her desire to live the observed life is stronger than ever, so instead of figuring out how to sustain herself when no one is looking, Charlotte puts her energy into schemes to make herself seen again.
After a series of missteps, including a model shoot that is among the most unnerving scenes in the book, she realizes that what she has left to sell is some version of her story: a model’s downfall, or a model’s medical miracle, or . . . something. As conscious as she is of image, and its management by professionals, even Charlotte is taken aback when her story attracts the attention of an entrepreneur creating a new Internet service called Ordinary People, and its offshoot, Extraordinary People. The two meet during a high-parody dealmaker lunch at Judson Grill, which smells of “arugula and money.” Charlotte is told that as an ex-model with 80 screws in her face, she can join a woman awaiting a transplant, a man on Death Row and a new member of Congress, among others, in having their lives open for non-stop viewing by a public that believes anything seen is somehow real.
Charlotte, who is packaged goods but not at all stupid, asks the entrepreneur who he thinks will care about ” ‘some fisherman’s dreams and family history,’ ” or her own. His response is a mini-sermon about the culture’s desperate hunger for something ” ‘real,’ ” for ” ‘raw experience.’ ” That what viewers get with Ordinary People and Extraordinary People will be planned, programmed and packaged is somehow beside the point. Charlotte hesitates, but in the end she sells herself, just as she always has.
Charlotte’s story is combined with a number of subplots concerning characters in Rockford who have a connection to her. The strands of the story come together when Charlotte and her entourage (including a woman Charlotte believes is a reporter, who has signed on to write the model’s “real” story) return to Rockford to restage the accident in the cornfield.
Charlotte Swenson isn’t a character we embrace exactly; to her, the examined life is the one she’s leading. But as our window on this world of images, Charlotte suits well, even though at times the minor characters are more engaging. The novel’s harmonic convergence of multiple plot lines at the end is unconvincing, except against the backdrop of contrivance that becomes the book’s atmosphere early on. “Look at Me” makes us think about our trust in the images that bombard us, and what we give away in the process.
