Book Reviews

Look at Me

Anchor, 432 pp., $14

This 2001 National Book Award finalist offers two kinds of pleasure that are rarely found together. On one hand, it's a fun, fast read -- a New York model has been in a car accident that alters her face completely, and various mysteries of her past and her future unfold, both in Manhattan and her Midwestern hometown, where the accident occurred. On the other, it's a densely layered treatment of the issues of image, self-presentation, and identity. This theme is explored both in classical terms (beauty, disguise, false identity) and postmodern ones (media- and Internet-generated realities, photography and celebrity, identities as brands and vice versa).

It's a juicy plot and a fascinating theme, yet the strength of Look at Me is its characters. The book has a large cast, with characters as old fashioned as an alcoholic private eye and as current as an emotionally disturbed Middle Eastern terrorist. The midsize characters -- a hunky high school football hero turned mentally ill history professor, a sartorially obsessed homeless man, a beautiful skateboarder with leukemia, a financially struggling comp lit professor and her composer husband -- are each a luminous short story in themselves.

The two protagonists, both named Charlotte (typical of this book, it makes good plotty sense and brings up philosophical issues of reference) are brilliantly done. The model, while engaging, ironic, and not unintelligent, has had her personality deformed by the lifelong focus on her appearance. She can't stop mentally criticizing other women's self-presentation, and her sexuality is a disaster. But her struggle to cope with the loss of her beauty is believable and endearing. Also winning is the other Charlotte, a plain but very bright adolescent who is discovering herself sexually and intellectually. Egan's earlier work, particularly her first novel, The Invisible Circus, and her article for The New York Times Magazine on self-mutilation, established that she has perfect pitch on teenage girls, and Look at Me follows suit: "At the sound of the horn, Charlotte ran from her house and plunged into the melty backseat of Roz's father's Park Avenue, a vaporous tank of hairspray, sour candy, body heat -- the smell of her friends -- a lost, familiar smell that enfolded her like bathwater the precise temperature of her body."

At times, the book's preoccupation with its theme borders on relentless. You get the main character walking down a Manhattan street in a ski-mask, obsessively noting the barely legible old painted signs on the sides of brick buildings for things like Griffin's Shears. But it never bogs down, and the writing is consistently excellent. Coming out of a movie theatre, "It was almost dark, a groggy smudge of pink beyond the shaded windows, puddles of rain suspended on the asphalt." Along with many other elements of this novel, that groggy smudge has adhered to my reality.