Look at Me by Jennifer Egan (2001)

A woman and a girl, both named Charlotte, encounter the same mysterious man who changes lives.

Book Review: Look at Me is clever, engaging, complex. An amazingly quick 500 plus pages. Clearly literary fiction, it aims even higher. Well written, Jennifer Egan's sentences are  worked like filigree. When a girl tried on her first adult dress, her younger sister "eyed the dress warily, as if knowing that it portended her neglect." "When she thought of herself a year ago she remembered a girl flush with outsized hopes. Charlotte hated her." Egan works hard at her words and sentences, with an extensive vocabulary that at times can be too extensive or too awkward for her characters. The plot is absorbing and intriguing, but also occasionally flawed, too implausible and coincidental to give it the same weight that her writing earns. Still, I read Look at Me relentlessly. There are several significant characters, which can become confusing if read in only one and two hour blocks. These are challenging characters; I'm unsure whether the author intended for them all to be "real" or allusive, but they're (mostly) all compelling. Look at Me raises significant issues, of a world where the importance of things has been lost to the importance of information, "the inversion of a thing"; where history is less meaningful than self-discovery, "personal history," and the exaltation of "identity." A world "without history or context or meaning ... because we are what we see." "The terrible acceleration of human history, combustive, exterminating, violent and blind." If this sounds like a world that "will end with fire," you're on the right track. For a book written before 9/11, Egan anticipates many developments and events (elements of terrorism, pictures of climate change, the power of social media, even the ubiquity of celebrity fragrances) that came after that key moment. For such a prescient book, I'm not sure why Look at Me seems forgotten. Egan is masterful at the elements of a story, though making them all coalesce at the end is difficult.  [3½★]