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Look at Me
Jennifer Egan.
Anchor Books: 2002
(paperback).
ISBN: 0385721358.
415 pages.
Guide not available
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Do you ever get tired of seeing the same old face in the mirror? Ever wish you could swap your mug for someone else's?
The lucky heroine of Jennifer Egan's novel gets to do just that, after she loses the original in a car accident.
With eighty titanium screws holding her new visage together, Charlotte Swenson returns to New York City to continue
her career as a second-tier fashion model.
The interesting thing is that nobody--not her agent, not her old friends
in the biz--recognizes the old Charlotte behind her still beautiful but completely restructured face. Struggling to
reorient herself, Charlotte comes to the painful realizations that she has a unique opportunity to explore a familiar
modern conundrum--if nobody can connect your former identity to your current image, how real is that identity in the
first place? Egan explores the always troubling relationship between what is essential and what is ornamental with
a fresh new eye in this novel, interweaving the story of Charlotte's quest to recapture her true self with that of a
young teenage girl playing a dangerous game for love, an alcoholic private eye on the trail of a mysterious stranger--one who may be preparing an apocalypse for America--and a faded academic who yearns to inspire just one of his students
with the truth of his life-changing revelation. This wildly ambitious novel may have some weak moments, but that doesn't
change the fact that it is one of the most original and passionate attempts to capture the mercurial essence of
contemporary life in America that we have ever run across. You're going to enjoy this one.
Featured in LATELIES.
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