The story begins with Danny's arrival at The Keep, an ancient European castle that has come into the possession of his cousin. Though Danny thrives on a busy social scene, he has left New York for the isolated confines of the Keep because he has angered too many people at home. Howie, the cousin, has been very successful in life and has bought the castle with the goal of creating a special sort of resort where people can escape from the modern and allow their sense of adventure and imagination free rein.

The story of Danny, Howie and the Keep alternates with that of its author or narrator, an inmate in a state penitentiary for unspecified crimes. He's taking part in a writing program, where he is creating or remembering the story of the Keep. With this story, he hopes to impress the leader of the writing group, a woman named Holly, but in prison, even writing a story can attract the animosity of a man's fellow inmates.

There's an interesting tension between the two narratives. Both stories are contemporary, but the story of the Keep, while mostly realistic, incorporates so many Gothic elements--not just the Keep itself, but an ancient baroness, a journey into the catacombs, a looming tower--as to push into the realm of fantasy or parody. The prison narrative, while not outwardly Gothic, still very much involves those Gothic elements such as isolation, confinement, the weight of the past, and forbidden longings.

Despite the use of Gothic and metafictional elements, the story is fairly restrained, which sometimes gives the novel a little bit of a truncated feeling. My initial response was to feel a little disappointed by the end of the novel, as if the unique setting and structure of the novel had promised much more than it had been able to deliver. On reflection, my affection for the novel has grown. The Keep is a story about the choices the people make and how those affect their lives and connections with others. It may not indulge the fan of the Gothic novel in the full-on outrageousness one may expect from that genre, but it does use those elements skillfully. 

I originally read this last year and needed to re-read for reading group, which will meet next Monday. I was fascinated with it then and even more so now. There is a very big twist at the end that even reading a second time it was still hard to pick up on. Again Jennifer Egan reminds me of a female Chuck Palahniuk...think twist at the end of Fight Club or Invisible Monsters. Here is the general premise without giving too much away. Cousin Danny goes to work at a castle in Europe for his estranged cousin Howie. We learn that they are estranged as Danny and another cousin pulled a nasty prank on Howie at a family picnic...early on you find out that Howie was in a cave for 3 days...alone. Howie has overcome the past and become a very powerful man and invested in renovating this castle so that it can become a hostel oasis. Danny had to leave New York and is very self-centered and tech dependent. Interspersed throughout the book is another storyline about Ray who is in jail and the writing course that he is taking from his teacher Holly. Danny has some harrowing events of his own while at the castle. Everything comes together at the end in a way that readers will interpret differently. That's why I am really looking forwad to reading group next week...to see what everyone else thinks. ( )

With almost 100 reviews on this site, and so much publicity, it's discouraging to add yet another. (The chances of this being read are small, and the chances of it swaying any readers are even smaller.) But I am impelled by a kind of irritation. It's a familiar irritation: I gave several days to this book, and it was a waste, and I want to write to someone!

Of all the books I have read this year, this is the worst. I agree almost entirely with Simone Oltolina, whose review is currently (as I write this) posted as "most helpful unfavorable review." But I disagree with the reason she says "The Keep" doesn't work. It's not because there are narrative threads left dangling. The problem is more pervasive. It is that Egan can't fill out scenes: she can't describe characters, and she can't even describe settings. The dank pools, castle keeps, dungeons, and forests here have been conjured so intensely, by so many people -- from Novalis to King! -- that it just won't do to have them sketched so cursorily, so feebly, with so little visual sense. I propose this test: take any scene in the novel, and try to picture it. What you'll get is only a Hollywood set, and the details of that set will be from the movies you have seen, not even from the novel. The book is threadbare, and Egan is not a novelist: a least not the kind she hopes, in this book, to be.

I am sorry to be so poisonous, but that is what happens when I give my time to a book that is so poor. Maybe amazon's reviews serve a cathartic purpose. I want to put this one behind me, and maybe warn someone else at the same time. ( )

Good, creepy fun. Also liked the novel's unusual structure. Egan is such a smart and talented writer. ( )

An atmospheric novel where very little is as it appears to be. A story within a story within a story told by people with secrets to keep. ( )

A satisfying read. It has a good plot, with estranged cousins reunited, a mad baroness, and plenty more that kept me reading. Characters could have been developed a little more but there is enough to engage with them. I liked the way the story developed and was satisfied with the way it closed. Overall, well worth the time it took to read it. ( )

How do you measure a book's success? Does an engaged audience equal a good book?
The Keep definitely engaged me:

* I groaned at the intentionally horrible writing on page 1 (It didn't improve from there).
* I scoffed at the ending when some of the loose ends find themselves tied up in neat little bows and some are never explained.
* I yelled WTF when Ray, the narrator, started butting in at random and when the baroness aged backward and forward and then backward again and when Danny started talking about "the worm" or "alto" or how he can just sense when there's a Wi-Fi connection nearby and...well, I don't want to reveal too much, but there were several WTF moments.
* Yet...I couldn't stop reading it.

Read the full review here. ( )

This is quite the cleverest book I've read in many a day. Egan plays with point of view and an unreliable narrator, and I couldn't flip pages quickly enough to catch up with her. Briefly, the plot has to do with a young man, down on his luck, who travels to Eastern Europe to help a cousin refurbish a castle for a hotel. Our traveler had been the stronger of the cousins when they were children and had subjected the castle owner to a terrible practical joke. And just who is the prisoner in an American jail taking a writing class while he becomes more and more obsessed with the instructor? Ms. Egan weaves two disparate stories elegantly into a 255-page whole. I loved it! ( )

I picked this up out of our popular reading collection in large part because there was a cool looking castle on the cover and the book flapped read a bit creepy. It was a pretty good read - it had me in pretty darn fast, and the narrative voice is interesting and engaging, although it took me a bit to adjust to some of the more jarring aspects of it. Ultimately, though, for some reason I felt like the story ended without ever quite hitting that last full note - there was something unsatisfying about it even as it surprised me and wrapped things into a ball that made sense. I think that maybe it couldn't quite decide what story it was telling, a fact complicated by the ending, and when things merged, they didn't do so quite as convincingly as I would have liked. The various perspectives didn't seem to quite be telling the same story, unfortunately.

Still, for all that, I'd say it's a worthwhile read, and the experiments with narrative voice are really interesting even if they don't quite work perfectly for me. ( )

Two intertwined stories, starting with one that is dominant, and ending with the second being much more resonant for me, as compared with the action- and suspense-oriented first. Egan is a great writer, and some of her turns of phrase caught me by surprise; one example is that of a character's feeling of love enveloping his ribcage. I liked the surrealness of the first story, all the more so for what it illuminated to me about the second. ( )

I say non-genre, but it's pretty much a neo-gothic novel. ( )

I liked the attempt this book made, but there were some very awkward spots. The first time the author addresses the reader was too random, too far into the book, and it didn't work well. Interesting story and could be good with polishing. ( )

The Keep by Jennifer Egan is a story within a story. First, it’s a story about cousins Howard and Danny, reunited to renovate a European castle – while attempting to heal from a childhood prank that scarred them both. It’s also the story of Ray, a prison inmate who was in a writing class, desperately trying to gain his teacher’s attention. You will have to read The Keep to understand how these stories reconcile, but I thought it melded together creatively.

At first, the narrative style used by Egan was a little jagged and hard to get used to. However, once I did, these characters captivated me. Ray and Danny were screaming for attention. Howard was a wounded soul in search for his life’s meaning. Even the writing teacher, Holly, emerged as a complicated yet realistic character.

While The Keep could be characterized as a Gothic novel with its musty castle, old baroness and family secrets, it’s really a story about imprisonment: how humans can imprison themselves into their daily lives, their pasts and their mistakes. Not only are characters physically imprisoned, they are emotionally “kept” too. They don’t reveal true feelings for each other. They try too hard to do what others think they should do. No one really seemed “free” in this story. It’s one of those books that will linger with me long after I completed it.

The Keep is not a book for everyone. But if you’re looking for refreshing storytelling – something a little unconventional – than I would recommend this novel to you. I look forward to reading more books by Jennifer Egan in the near future. ( )

This novel-within-a-novel finally pulled out of a tailspin toward the end, but I thought it was just barely worth the effort overall. ( )

The Keep, by Jennifer Egan, is entertaining popular fiction with a surprising literary twist. This novel contains three separate narratives, with three different narrators, yet each is artfully intertwined to create a satisfying whole—as a bonus, there is a thought-provoking thematic message…not something you typically find in popular fiction, and even less common in gothic thrillers! The prose is well done. It is difficult to juggle three narratives and three narrators, but I Egan has done an admirable job. I enjoyed this book not only for its intriguing structure and eerie story, but also because it kept me thinking about its theme long after I’d finished the last page…and, for me, that is often the mark of a good book.

The first narrative is a creepy modern gothic novel, complete with an ancient crumbling castle, a long-suppressed motive for revenge, a wicked old baroness who morphs into a young sexpot, ghostly apparitions, betrayals, obsessions, strange sounds, dark closed spaces, and dank smells. This narrative is told by Danny, a hip, ex-con, Generation-X, self-proclaimed cell phone junkie—a psychologically damaged survivor of a long string of failed attempts to make any kind of stable life. As the story opens, he has just arrived at a ruined castle near Prague owned by his multi-millionaire cousin Howard. Howard aims to turn the castle into a new-age psychological and spiritual retreat for people who want temporarily to take a vacation from the high-tech multi-media world and reacquaint themselves with their inner primitive imaginations. Howard has brought his cousin Danny over to the castle to help with the renovations…or is that just his cover story? The longer Danny stays in the castle away from any connection to the outside world, the greater his paranoia grows. Danny dwells on very real revenge motivations that his cousin might harbor against him for an extremely cruel childhood prank. Psychologically, Danny starts to unravel and the plot turns ominous.

The second narrative concerns the life of the author of the first narrative, a prisoner named Ray doing time for murder and writing a novel in installments as part of a behind-bars creative writing course. Ray says the castle story is something that a buddy told him, but we’re never convinced of that…the story seems too real. Ultimately, the narrator’s true identity in the story is revealed when Ray’s full name is disclosed, but by that time we already suspect which character he is. Most of the prison narrative hinges on Ray’s infatuation with his teacher, Holly—a woman who slowly starts to return his interest.

Holly is both the narrator and subject of the brief third and final section. Since the end of the second part already nicely concludes the previous two narratives, the reader expects this very short third section to serve as an epilogue. But Egan uses this section mainly to expand on her theme, not the narrative. I suspect that this will puzzle and disappoint popular fiction readers, who typically read a novel primarily for the story. Personally, I loved the ending. It highlighted the theme and brought it full-circle back to the beginning—that is, to the point early in the story where Howard and his wife describe how the round “Imagination Pool” might be used by future guests (see page 47).

So what is the theme of this unique gothic novel with a small literary twist? Actually it is quite serious. Egan aims to show that modern civilization robs its citizens of their imagination. Early in the novel, Danny’s cousin Howard says: “We’ve lost the ability to make things up. We’ve farmed out that job to the entertainment industry, and we sit around and drool on ourselves while they do it for us” (p. 45). What the author is telling us, is that modern culture, with its ubiquitous cell-phone-wifi-video-clip-television-film culture, has imprisoned people’s imaginations—they have lost touch with their innate ability to imagine and create entertaining narratives out of everyday experience. If modern man is bored, he turns on the TV or drops out with drugs. If ancient man was bored, he created ghost and goblins, saw monsters and gods floating overhead in the patterns of clouds, and felt ecstasy simply by experiencing the beauty of the natural world. This theme reverberates throughout the novel and the lives of its three main characters, and since there are multiple narrators, we get to understand this effect from various viewpoints.

This work is primarily an entertaining story, a compelling creepy gothic thriller—the addition of a strong literary theme is a bonus, and as I said in the beginning, not something you often find in popular fiction. I suspect this is the primary reason why this novel has produced so many mixed reviews: it neither fully satisfies the popular fiction reader nor the literary reader, but it is a very good book.

My advice: enjoy the story, but take a little time to think about, and perhaps savor, the theme, if you do, it will heighten and prolong your enjoyment of the whole. ( )

enjoyed this book. The characters were complex and it made me question what was real and imaginary. Well written and worth discussing. ( )

This book was an interesting read. It was difficult to understand at times when the narrative jumped. But...I liked this book! I loved the rippling affect of the underlying suspense. Sometimes it creeped up on to you. That's the kind of book that I like. I'm glad that I picked this up! ( )

Wonderfully crafted novel. Egan entwines two different storylines, each with a distinct atmosphere and tone, that seemingly have no connection with each other. When she does bring them together both stories are beautifully and movingly resolved. This is a very clever author, with a great imagination and a great heart. ( )

Read "The Invisible Circus" and "Look at Me" first. ( )

A mobius-strip of a book, weaving together stories of the renovations of a castle in Europe, the convict supposedly writing the renovation story, and the convict's writing instructor in prison. The twists and turns keep this book interesting, and the ending of Part 2 is downright captivating, but the book overall is not terribly compelling. The dialog is trite, and the characters seem superficially drawn, their relationships unexplored and ultimately unconvincing. ( )

This might have worked out better as a collection of short stores or as three separate books...as written, it's an intriguing idea with lots of potential that really doesn't come together or feel fulfilling to the reader after it's all said and done. The initial story line is a group of cousins at a family reunion where something tragic and beyond mean is done to Howie by Danny. The book then shifts almost immediately to a prison where we learn that the characters we've just gotten hooked on are in fact fictional, the writing project of an inmate (Ray). From this point, the events of Ray's prison life and his attempted wooing of the writing teacher are alternated with the continued building of the Danny/Howie drama...after the "incident" Howie goes on to become a successful dot com entrepreneur with family and early retirement as a millionaire while Danny is a dedicated cyber-junkie living life in the fast lane. He goes to an unspecified location in Eastern Europe to a crumbling told castle at Howie's insistence (and to get away from his troubles back in New York). What should be a second chance for everyone involved (in both stories) slowly begins to deteriorate and the stories more or less parallel this spiral into bleakness for all involved.

Egan seems unable to chose a genre and stick it out so we wind up with a mixed bag of modern gothic, part suspense thriller, part morality tale, with a bit of romance and redemption thrown in near the end. I truly wanted to like the story, but none of the characters in the three stories are fully fleshed out, the endings are quite abrupt and left me feeling confused about what it all really meant in the end (what the author's intended message was), and the writing was quite choppy, though I do get that some of that was intentional as part of the storyline of having a convicts writing assignment as 1/3 it. I guess it's disappointing mostly because it started out with such promise...a crumbly old castle complete with Keep and cantankerous Baroness, certainly a wonderful atmospheric element for any story...but it just never fully develops. I wanted more from it, the parallels between the Keep story and the prison are interesting, one can see a kind of reverse parallel between the Keep itself (to keep the inhabitants safe and the bad guys out) and the prison (to keep the bad guys in and the outside world safe) but in the end, it's an ambiguous connection that never really delivers anything satisfying. I wound up giving The Keep three stars instead of four because I felt so unsatisfied at the end. I'd definitely check this out from the library or wait until the paperback comes out, I wouldn't pay hardback prices for a book that just doesn't deliver on any of its plots when it's all said and done. ( )

Amusing story that reads a bit like a gothic novel but with a contemporary conceit constructed in the sub-story, or perhaps the sub-story is the real story.

The tale didn't thrill me, but held my attention. I liked Danny, who can sense with his body the presence of wi-fi access, though that yummy detail is pretty much abandoned after the opening chapters. The other characters aren't real enough to like or dislike. Ending is fairly predictable. I don't think this will appeal to seasoned literary readers, and it is a bit too odd to appeal to the best seller mob. The book's success will rest on the weary shoulders of the mid-list readers who just want something that isn't an Oprah book, or in every other person's subway reading bag. ( )

The Keep is a twisty, layered tale. It's both a Gothic novel and a prison memoir, alternating between a crumbling Eastern European schloss and a prisoners’ writing program in New York. The strands of the story continually interrupt each other, but I never lost interest in the characters or the narrative.

Much of The Keep’s charm is the way it blurs internal and external reality. The story is told in installments by Ray, a maximum-security prisoner. Ray's writing instructor, Holly, has troubles of her own, but Ray’s story captures her attention. It’s unclear which of the story’s male characters represents Ray, or how much of the story is fantasy. Nevertheless, Holly comes to believe that it’s true.

More detailed review here:
http://www.readforpleasure.com/2007/0... ( )

at first i found the story within a story motif to be a nuisance; i just wanted to read about the castle, about the cousins howard and danny, and the keep and the baroness. while i came around to the other story, that of ray and the prison writing class, i still feel that a full, rich story could be told just about the keep and the castle and the family that owned it for centuries, not to mention the battle over true ownership-- those who hold the castle in name and those who hold it in deed.

i felt the ending was somewhat tacked on-- there were details the author wanted to convey to us and there seemed to be no other way than to switch to a third narrator after the entire novel to that point had alternated between danny and ray. it left me a bit unsatisfied but not so much that it ruined what i had read up to that point, as truly bad endings will do. it felt more like the author had written herself into a corner and this was the only way out.

on the whole, however, i found the handling of the characters was skilled--their voices distinct, the transitions between them were rather smooth, and the story--or rather, stories--kept you turning the pages.

recommended for the long, cold days of winter or a rainy beach weekend. ( )

Two estranged cousins rennovate a medieval castle in Europe which holds old mysteries -- secret tunnels, an old baroness holed up in 'the keep', and posssibly ghosts. Traumatic events from the cousins shared childhood are also dredged up. As if this all weren't enough, there is more going on here as the novel is a post-modernesque 'story with in a story' with many intrusions into the sacred space between narrator and reader.

For me -- it was all just too much. Ms. Egan tried to hard to do too much. As compelling as some aspects of the story were, the book was just too short to do them justice. In particular the drowning of the von Ausblinker twins and the baroness' early life -- we were teased with these storylines but no deliverance. In their stead, we are all too often in the mind of the very unlikable and unseemly character of Danny. His contrived character traits and his overuse of the f-word made me almost embarrassed for the author.

The twists and turns at the end were my favorite part; and perhaps made the book worth reading; but overall this novel failed for me. ( )