Highly Recommended
A few days after I started reading The Keep, it was announced that the book's author, Jennifer Egan, had won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her more recent book, A Visit From the Goon Squad. Does that make me early or late to jump on the bandwagon? Either way, Egan is bona fide. This is a weird but totally readable novel that was a perfect respite from months upon months of reading nothing but long-form nonfiction, short-form nonfiction and news blogs. My attention span needed the exercise. It's a fast-paced horror-thriller hybrid that switches between two stories just often enough to build the perfect amount of suspense, sort of like a postmodern soap opera, or an episode of Twin Peaks.
The story goes like this: Danny just reunited with his cousin Howard after a 20-year gap in their relationship — the result of a sadistic childhood prank — to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe that is in various states of ruin, and comes with a kind of holding cell that contains the castle's ancient witchlike baroness. It's a bizarre story, but Egan tells it as if it were The Grapes of Wrath rather than Geek Love, so when you realize in the first chapter (this is no true spoiler, but if you want to be surprised, stop reading now) that the story is being told by a convicted murderer who is participating in his prison writing class, it surprisingly makes more sense. I've never read anything like The Keep, but Egan reminds me of JT LeRoy or Mary Gaitskill in her ability to talk about gothic events with an everyday plainness, and she wraps the story together in an ending that is unforgettable. I can't wait to follow up with A Visit From the Goon Squad, but not before I cram in a few hours of scouring Jezebel, Science Times and back issues of The New Yorker. One must maintain one's well-roundedness, after all.
—Laura Hutson, Scene calendar editor
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