The Beatrice Interview: Jennifer Egan (2001)

When Jennifer Egan came up with the idea for Ordinary People, the online docutainment series that plays a prominent role in her second novel, Look at Me, it was 1995 and she was still two years away from logging on to the Internet. She had intended for the website, which selects a group of, you guessed it, ordinary people and provides viewers with round-the-clock access to their personal lives, to be appallingly ludicrous, but pop culture moved so fast, she ruminated over lunch in Brooklyn one early October afternoon, “it doesn’t seem funny and crazy anymore, it seems like social commentary.”

But in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, what will most likely be remembered about the novel is the character of Z, an Islamic fundamentalist who blends so well into American culture while preparing to attack that he ends up going native, fleeing from his terrorist cell and recreating himself as a schoolteacher in Rockford, Illinois. “The classic suicide terrorist profile is a young man with nothing to lose,” she says, explaining how she came to create Z, “no family ties, no sophistication, little or no education. And that didn’t really work for me as a character, so I made my guy much more sophisticated. I worried that once the dotcom company became less satirical and more realistic, the terrorist character would seem too far out, too wacky, out of sync with the rest of the book.” Reading the book now, however, the idea of a well-educated terrorist moving freely through American culture seems chillingly prescient.

When you were writing Look at Me, though, the concept of Islamic fundamentalist sleeper agents would have been considered unusual, if not outlandish.

Especially a very capable one. One way in which I departed from my research is that my impression was that these guys were mostly bumblers. If you remember the bombing at the World Trade Center in 1993… seven people died, of course, but it was still a very slipshod effort in a lot of ways. My impression talking to counterterrorism experts, seconded by my close reading of the New York Times over several years, was that these people weren’t a huge threat. We knew they were around, but there was a sense that they couldn’t get it together to do anything much, and I believed that too.

Are you still giddy with excitement about the National Book Award nomination?

I’m having trouble believing it still. I feel like I’ve gotten into a really good college by mistake, like I don’t deserve it. (smiles) I’m very happy, but it seems incredible to me that with all those books, I’ve been named as one of the five fiction nominees.

I spent six years giving the novel everything I had… There’ve been moments in the last few weeks where I wasn’t sure what was going to happen to the book, where I was wondering if the last six years were going to amount to nothing much. So I feel like this is a second chance in a way; maybe more people will read it now.

One of the common characterizations of Look at Me is that it’s about “a model whose face is destroyed in a car accident.” Which is not only untrue&#8212lCharlotte suffers facial injuries, but not disfigurement—it makes the book sound like a potboiler.

That’s another reason I’m grateful for the nomination. The book has been described in the media in a way that is unappealing to the readers that I need. Somebody who wants to read about models is going to hate this book, and the kind of reader that will like it may be driven away by the fact that it’s about a model. Looking back, I should have seen this confusion coming, but I don’t really know much about marketing books. I just try to write good ones.

I think people have wanted the book to be about other things and got upset that it wasn’t. It’s a very hard book to describe, because there are several plotlines, and you do have to pick one. I guess you could say that’s the central one. Charlotte is sort of the backbone of the novel, but that characterization of her situation grossly misrepresents the book. It makes me see how… Well, if Don Delillo weren’t Don Delillo, how would you describe Underworld? Not that I’m saying my book’s as good as that, but they’re similar in that they’re both complicated books with multiple plotlines.

So you reduce it to a story about the baseball that Bobby Thomson hit to send the Giants to the World Series.

And some readers would love to read a book about that, but then be completely disappointed in Underworld, and other people won’t want to read about baseball.

I’ve learned how useful it is to have a premise that you can just say quickly and have people understand. Like Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections: a family story with a postmodern flourish. Great! That sounds interesting, it sounds appealing. But a disfigured model? It sounds almost bathetic, like Autobiography of a Face only by somebody you could care less about.

The next time I finish a book, and since I take so long to write this is a ways off, I’ll have to think about whether there’s a path of least resistance people could take in trying to characterize the book that would misrepresent it. If I think that’s true, I’m going to work very hard to fend that off from the beginning.

What was the first hook that drew you into this story?

I don’t really start with a plot. I start with an atmosphere more than anything. The first thing that I had was that I wanted to write about the midwest. Rockford, Illinois, where a lot of the book takes place, is my mom’s hometown. I kept having an urge to go back there, which is weird, because it really didn’t have much to offer apart from my family, and once my grandparents were dead… But when I went back, I didn’t feel alienated and weird; I got this sense that I was in the middle of someplace important. I got an almost electrical sense that my next book was going to happen here.

Other little pieces came to me. I knew that there’d be a mad historian, somebody who was really obsessed, and a young girl who was an acolyte of his. I knew that there would be a chameleon, somebody who shed his identities, but I didn’t know from the beginning that he’d turn out to be a terrorist.

I was driving to Rockford on one of my visits, and I was in a thunderstorm that was so severe we just had to pull over. The rain was just smashing against the windshield. So the car’s stopped between two cornfields, and I had the radio on, and I suddenly had an idea about a woman going off the road in the middle of a storm. But, again, I didn’t know at first that she was a model.

Those were the things I had to begin with, and I wasn’t sure how they would fit together. But piece by piece, the story began to illuminate itself. It took a long time to get it right, though. I didn’t want to just altnernate chapters; I find that very formulaic. So then I had to think about when we switch from one plotline to another. And the stories are told so differently, Charlotte’s in first person, the others in third person. The issue of control, of connecting the two voices so that they seemed to be united, was very difficult. It was beyond my range technically when I started, so I had to expand my range, my skills, in order to do it. That’s always the fun stuff. If you just do what you know how to do, you keep doing the same thing.

You were also working as a journalist while writing this novel. Did you choose assignments because they were helpful for the book, or take subjects you’d written about for assignments and incorporate them into the fiction?

I’m usually circling an array of ideas at any given time, and those ideas govern my fiction and my nonfiction decisions, so it’s no surprise that the two end up overlapping. I accepted the modeling assignment for my research. I didn’t know anything about models in New York, and I’d already made a few fumbling attempts to get access to models for research. You can imagine how excited they were to have an unknown novelist hang around. I’d never really done journalism before, but I got asked if I would be interested in doing this story. At first I was concerned about having to spend so much time on the story, and especially about having to write it, but it was almost like a gift for the novel. If it hadn’t been for the novel, I probably wouldn’t have done the article, because I was so worried about failing at it. It was always intended to be a cover story for the Times Sunday magazine, and I thought, “How can I do this?” But I figured that at least I’d have my research for the novel done, and I would get some money, even if it was just the kill fee.

Some assignments I accept just because I’m interested in the material, even if it’s not in the book I’m writing. Like cutting—I took that assignment just because it interested me, and it wasn’t until after writing that article that I came up with the scene in Look at Me where the photographer is cutting models’ faces.

A bizarre scene, but then, you originally conceived of Look at Me as a satire…

…and wrote it as a satire, too! But the buying and selling of lives that I found so outrageous when I dreamed it up… It’s not like everything I wrote about it has come to pass, but when I started reading about the wave of reality programming after Survivor, I thought I was reading an April Fool’s edition. I thought it just couldn’t be possible. What I wrote just doesn’t read as satire anymore, and that disappoints me for two reasons. One is that the novel just doesn’t read the way I always intended it, but beyond that, I’m so appalled that what I imagined as a grotesque scenario is now reality.

So many things started coming up after I’d written them, though, that I’m not as surprised by what’s happened now. When I started writing about Moose, the Unabomber hadn’t been caught yet. He was out there, but the manifesto hadn’t been published, we didn’t know he was an academic. After I wrote about Charlotte being fascinated by old ads painted on the sides of buildings, there was a newspaper article about an exhibit of photographs of those types of signs at the New York Historical Society. So I went to the exhibit, and some of the pictures they had were of buildings I’d been looking at while I was thinking about those scenes… So I had these kinds of experiences a lot.

Now the book looks like it’s on target, but I was really trying to be ahead of the curve. Maybe the problem’s just that I write too slowly. (smiles) I think it still reads as satirical, but not quite to the inventive degree I hoped.

Both of your novels have narrative elements of the thriller, but you’re clearly not writing thrillers.

The Invisible Circus is more overtly like a mystery. Somebody has died, we’re not sure why, and we try to find out. But if you tried to market it as a mystery, it wouldn’t have worked; there’s other things going on mystery fans wouldn’t care for. Look at Me… I didn’t think about that this time. I was more concerned that with so many plotlines, it would be hard to tie it together and keep the momentum going, to make it feel like one big story moving forward.

I don’t really read thrillers now, though I loved mysteries as a kid, even the really debased ones like Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins and the Hardy Boys. To some degree the excitement of reading and looking for an answer has stayed with me and influenced my writing. Whenever I pick up a thriller, the problem for me is that the writing is so bad. You can hear the plot machinery creaking, and nothing is compelling to me if it’s in lifeless prose. Some people can combine thriller stories and good writing. Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent is a very good book, which I loved. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History had a very lush prose to it as well.

What was the experience of the film adaptation of The Invisibile Circus like?

I got a lot of money when I really needed it, so it’s been a positive experience for me. In a way, that’s the beginning and the end of the discussion. Oh, and my mom and I got to visit the set and meet Cameron Diaz.

I found it hard to read the screenplay. Reading my book boiled down to something that could be shot in ninety minutes, I found that it was missing a lot of the past, what film people would call the “backstory,” the things that explained the character’s present behavior. So I was worried about how understandable the character’s actions would be without that underpinning. I also realized how melodramatic the story was. Somehow that had been lost on me as I was working on it, as the literary elements cushioned all the tearful confrontations and revelations. (laughs)

I never got to see the final version, because my baby had just been born, and I never had time to arrange for a babysitter or anything so I could get out to the theatre before the film left. But I think that it was done in good faith. Adam Brooks [the film’s writer and director] and I were interested in many of the same things, and I think that it’s a really honest project. I’m looking forward to renting it now that it’s on video.

What’s going on now?

Right now, I’m writing an article for the Times about babies born to women in prison. I’m not sure what my next fiction project is. I’ve had a collection in mind for a while, called A Visit from the Goon Squad, and I’ve already written some stories for that. But I can’t just sit down and say, “OK, I’m going to work on stories for ten months.” For me, stories are always something I slip into between other things.

I’d love to get deep into another novel, but it would have to be something simple, not a complicated story like this one. For a while, I wanted to do a gothic story with a huge plot twist, but I haven’t been able to sustain a sense of possibility about that idea, so I don’t know where it’s going to go anymore.