ABSTRACT
Jennifer Egan’s work traces shifting perceptions of time, memory and technological change in the contemporary era, offering keenly observed and often prescient insights into American culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. ‘Freakishly,’ Egan observed of her 2001 novel Look at Me, a decade after it was first published, ‘almost every aspect I invented has come to pass in some way, including the terrorist who fantasises about blowing up the World Trade Centre’ (Fox 2011: n.pag.). The ‘freakish’ predictions which occasionally emerge in Egan’s writing are the result of careful social observation, demonstrated in her depictions of New York-based celebrity and media scenes, the inexorable intertwining of commercial interests with new technologies, and the frustrations of social conformity and suburban life. Look At Me explores a feverish schism between reality, virtual reality and marketing prompted by the advance of new media and blogging platforms, and this interest in the effects of changing technologies is central to much of Egan’s published work. In The Keep (2007), A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) and the short story ‘Black Box’ (2012a), Egan pursues her interest in technologised intersections of culture and commerce, while retaining the skilful depiction of memory and loss central to earlier short stories and her first published novel, The Invisible Circus (2012c). Egan’s most recent novel, Manhattan Beach (2017), reconfigures these concerns in a historical context, setting the possibilities offered by technological progress in 1930s New York against the perilous backdrop of the second world war. This chapter examines the evolution of these themes across Egan’s oeuvre, reflected in her subtle experimentation with style, genre and narrative structure.
