Book of a lifetime: Look at Me by Jennifer Egan

From The Independent archive: Eliane Glaser devours a sprawling and transformational novel that looks at the commodification of human life – and warns us that we are exhausting our chances for change

Jennifer Egan won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her fourth novel, ‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ (Pieter M Van Hattem)

I devoured three brilliant novels by Jennifer Egan last year: the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, Look at Me and The Keep. It was a weird time. I’d just been on a year’s maternity leave with my son; my father died; and I found out I was pregnant with my daughter.

I felt pulled between optimism and pessimism, hope and dread. And when I read Egan’s novels, I could barely believe how much they chimed with my ambivalent state of mind. A Visit from the Goon Squad, the most perfect of the three, combines faith in the human capacity for empathy and renewal with a dystopian vision of our technological and environmental destiny. The parts set in the all-too-near future document a nightmarish world in which infants are referred to as “pointers” because those who are old enough to point are addicted to mobile phones. New Yorkers watch the sunset from the top of a “water wall” protecting the city from rising sea levels.

But it was Look at Me, first published in 2001, that I found particularly resonant. The novel’s sprawling plot involves two characters called Charlotte: one a thirtysomething New York model who is horribly injured in a car crash and attempts, with picaresque tragicomedy, to reconstruct her face and life; the other a wayward small-town teenager tutored by an eccentric professor uncle named Moose. Moose is obsessed with the transformation of his home town in Illinois from rust-and-grease industrial heartland to strip mall and parking-lot wasteland. It’s a microcosm of the epochal shift from an age when people made stuff with their hands and with machines to the post-modern age of Starbucks and commodity markets.