Book Review: The Keep by Jennifer Egan
Monday, May 10th, 2010
This review was originally posted in the Horror Reviews section of Horror-Web, under my Horror-Web pseudonym, Penny Dreadful.
Take one dilapidated Eastern European castle, one potentially insane old doyenne who refuses to leave the oldest part of the castle, a wealthy former nerd bent on turning the castle into a “spiritual retreat,” his pseudo-punk technologically-addicted cousin who might have accidentally almost killed said nerd back when they were kids, a sprinkle of old-fashioned Gothic horror, and a handful of post-modern storytelling. Shake well. What do you get?
“Gee, Penny Dreadful! I think I get a great modern classic that I’m just itching to read! Right?”
Not exactly. Actually, what you get is an annoying blend of three perfectly fine individual stories that combine as a pseudo-intellectual take on the genre that tries way too hard to be Serious Literature. That’s what you get in Jennifer Egan’s The Keep.
It starts off well enough and managed to hook me pretty quick. Pseudo-cyber punk Danny makes his way to cousin Howie’s latest real estate purchase, an old castle somewhere in Eastern Europe (no one is exactly clear on where, since “the border are constantly changing”). The story has great pace in the beginning, perfectly communicating Danny’s personality–a post-goth slacker, utterly addicted to a life of technology and living off the good graces of anyone who will give him some cash and a place to live. He is the perfect 21st-century 20-something laggard, all flash and surface charm, convinced the world owes him a living while secretly agonizing over guilt from his past (naturally over something he did to the cousin). There’s a lot of unease and confusion, even more so when Danny realizes that he is technologically cut off here — even his satellite phone doesn’t work.
Howie is a well-drawn character, too. He’s the ideal the geek made good who might indeed have been driven a little crazy as a result of childhood trauma. Is he a savvy adult trying to play a little trick to pay back a childhood hurt? Or is there a darker motive at play, a deeper, more obsessive and destructive kind of revenge?
Just when you start to care about those questions, however, things start to go a little wonky. Danny and Howie (and their host of minor character) are actually mere characters in someone else’s story–a prison inmate taking a writing class. He’s only writing the story to get time and attention from the young, pretty writing teacher, whom Egan makes clear is very out of place in the prison educational system. Or at least we think that’s it, because suddenly it seems the inmate might be Howie’s 2nd in command. Who might have killed Howie. In what might have been a love triangle.
Maybe.
In fact, it all might be a story, a memoir written by the writing teacher after her stint as a prison educator. But the truth is, by the time things reached that point, I really didn’t care. I started off caring about Howie and Danny and their castle and the madwoman in the keep, and Howie’s wife and kids and whether or not the wife had an affair because Howie was getting dangerously obsessed with the castle. I loved the madwoman–what fan of Gothic fiction doesn’t love a madwoman?–and wondered at her power and potential supernatural abilities. I didn’t give a damn about the prison inmates. They were in the way of the story I did care about, and I cared even less about the teacher, who was the stereotype of the pretty prison teacher woman, with her heart of gold and desire to see the good in all the inmates. Screw that – bring back the mad duchess!
I don’t recommend The Keep. I could have, if the first narrative was the only narrative or if perhaps the two primary stories — castle vs prison–were two entirely separate books (each being potentially interesting enough on their own). But this strange mishmosh of three stories trying desperately to weave into one narrative was annoying and unsatisfying. It left me with a sense of wasted time and wasted talent, and that is the last thing I want from a horror novel.
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