Dracula himself couldn't have lived in a spookier old castle than the one Danny, a thirtysomething New Yorker on the run, arrives at in Jennifer Egan's The Keep. It's an ancient ruin in eastern Europe with crumbling stone walls, an intact central stronghold, a labyrinth of underground tunnels and a dungeon complete with instruments of torture.
Currently being converted into a resort, the castle is owned by Danny's cousin, Howard, who Danny left for dead in a cave for three days when they were teens, and who Danny now suspects may be out to return the favor, or worse.
It's a promising start, but it's also just the surface of The Keep, an onion of a novel that reveals layer after layer in a way that's ingenious and engrossing. Early on, you learn that the tale of Danny and Howard is being told by Ray, a convicted murderer, as part of a writing workshop in a maximum-security prison. As the book proceeds, the two stories begin, intricately and spookily, to converge -- but not before becoming intertwined with a third narrative thread: that of the fiction workshop's teacher, a former meth addict named Holly.
The dazzling result is a metafictional tour de force, a probing look at the paradoxically alienating effects of global telecommunications and, best of all, a 21st century reinvention of the Gothic ghost story.
FICTION
THE KEEP
By Jennifer Egan
Knopf, 256 pages, $23.95
Despite his apparent status as a fictional character in the novel's story-within-a-story, Danny is the central and most compelling figure here, a technology freak who believes he can sense the availability of wi-fi networks and carries his own portable satellite. He counts on interpersonal connectivity, especially the disembodied kind enabled by cell phones and e-mail, the way a devoutly religious person relies on prayer as an avenue to the beyond. The signal may not always be clear, but it's better than nothing; in certain ways, in fact, it's better than being face to face.
Howard, on the other hand, is a relative Luddite who believes in another kind of connection -- that made possible by immersion in the medieval world of the castle, where "witches and goblins were hiding in corners," where "people looked at the sky and saw angels." He envisions the edifice itself -- complete with underground tunnels, a torture chamber and a stronghold known as a keep (currently occupied by an imperious baroness who refuses to acknowledge Howard's ownership) -- as a retreat, where people can transcend what he calls the "real/unreal binary," reconnecting with old-world magical thinking and leaving their cell phones behind. "We're living in a supernatural world, Danny," he says. "We're surrounded by ghosts."
And here is Egan's great theme: that there are different species of ghosts, literal and metaphorical, including the whispering-from-the-spirit-world type and others who never existed before the information age. It's the presence of these ghosts that leave her characters increasingly asking: Is it real, or does it just seem that way? And is there any meaningful difference between the two?
It's an absorbing debate, but it never gets in the way of Egan's concern for her first duty, which is spinning a gripping yarn that draws you in with all the old-fashioned craft of a campfire ghost story. In fact, you get the feeling that Egan began her manuscript caring most about the abstract ideas she's playing with here, but ended up caring at least as much about the characters. For writers of a certain kind of literary ambition -- metafictionists like John Fowles and the latter-day Philip Roth, or essayists like Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo -- this isn't always an important distinction; for most readers, it's crucial. If characters don't ring true to the author, how can they to the reader?
The question is increasingly relevant for today's literary novelists, who are under an intense intellectual pressure to grapple with the bewildering matrix of issues that defines contemporary reality. It's not enough for these writers to tell a crackling good story with well-developed characters; they must also impart some deeper wisdom about climate change or geopolitics or the latest trends in consumer technology.
Some younger authors have cracked under the pressure, shoe-horning their masters' theses into their narratives and reducing their characters to ventriloquists' dummies. Others -- notably Jonathan Franzen in 2001's The Corrections -- have manifested their braininess in subtler forms, combining clever narrative strategies and a devotion to analyzing the zeitgeist with the classical virtues of fiction that Aristotle defined a few thousand years ago, including plot and character.
Happily, Egan's achievement here is in the second category. She enjoys making puzzles, setting traps and weaving multiple plot strands as well as any fictional trickster, but she's also got Aristotle down cold. The beauty of The Keep is that for all its gleeful game-playing, it's not a mind game; instead, it's the emotionally engaging (if not quite straightforward) story of what actually happens to a group of people who seem as real to us as we do to ourselves.
In the end, the book is no more complicated than, say, Bleak House, and it draws us in with its compelling realism as surely as anything by Dickens or Balzac -- not to mention Henry James, who understood better than anyone how to turn the screw.
Kevin Nance is the Sun-Times' art and architecture critic.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/nance/cs ... eep27.html
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