The Keep

This book is unusual. It is a modern gothic tale of imprisonment and escape, both physically and mentally. It is two stories that merge in an interesting way.

Story one is set in a dilapidated castle in the wilderness of Eastern Europe, complete with a keep and tunnels. It is an eerie setting with elements that border on the paranormal. Protagonist Danny has been invited to the castle by his cousin, Howie, who is renovating it to turn it into a hotel. The cousins were involved in an incident as children, where Danny abandoned Howie in an underground cave.

Story two involves prisoners taking a creative writing class. One of the prisoners, Ray, is writing a story. Writing serves as his mental escape. Teacher Holly has struggled with drug show more addiction, so she was in a prison of a different kind. Story two contains an ambiguity as to what is real versus what is imagined.

The characters must eventually confront their psychological traumas. There is an undercurrent of fear and anxiety. It can be confusing in places, and it is not for everyone, but I found it weirdly wonderful. I have previously read two other books by Egan, and this is my favorite of the three. show less

Back in 2006, Jennifer Egan published this little (255 pages in my paperback copy) novel about two cousins reunited in an eastern European country where one is renovating an old castle. Except this is Jennifer Egan -- the brain from whence came [b:A Visit from the Goon Squad|7331435|A Visit from the Goon Squad|Jennifer Egan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1356844046l/7331435._SX50_.jpg|8975330] and [b:The Candy House|58437521|The Candy House|Jennifer Egan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1642351487l/58437521._SY75_.jpg|86707532] -- so nothing can actually be that simple.

Danny, the cousin whose life in New York has fallen apart (although we never get the whole show more story), leaving him with few options but to accept a one-way ticket to his cousin's project, is a hot mess. Howie, aforementioned cousin, used to be a hot mess, especially after Danny and another cousin basically tried to kill him when they were all teens. Now he has his life together: a wife, a kid, money to invest in a strange project centering around the old castle. But how can you not wonder, as the reader, if Howie is plotting revenge now that he has the upper hand? Within the first 50 pages, I was sucked in to the story, couldn't wait to see how this would all end.

That's when the story suddenly shifts to an inmate taking a writing class. Is the story of Danny and Howie just a figment of his imagination, created to impress his writing teacher? From there, the novel shifts back and forth between these two seemingly different worlds, but you know they'll eventually connect.

This was a delightful little mindfuck of a novel. Sorting through the clues to find the connections and the "truth" (if that actually exists) spiced up my December reading. This earlier novel isn't as polished as Ms. Egan's more recent works, but that's part of its charm. It was recommended by one of my library co-workers, which I second if you like your fiction unpredictable. show less

I think I liked this book (The Keep by Jennifer Egan)...but I’m not sure? The story begins with a young man escaping his problems in New York to help his cousin renovate a castle into a hotel in Europe, but soon Egan shifts to a man in prison taking a writing class. She manages to keep the two stories running in such a way that the truth of what is happening feels bent, and the ending left me very confused. But, I finished it, I (mostly) enjoyed reading it, and I definitely appreciate Egan’s writing style. Egan fans looking at her older titles who aren’t afraid of some strangeness should give The Keep a try.

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!

How easy it is, to spend one’s life anticipating a pivotal moment when everything will sense.
From pg 69, Danny is waiting for:
“THE THING. Danny had no idea what the thing was. All he knew was that he lived more or less in a constant state of expecting something any day, any hour, that would change everything, knock the world upside down and put Danny’s whole life into perspective as a story of complete success, because every twist and turn and snag and fuckup would always have been leading up to this.”
Egan’s story lures the reader into a gothic world of ambiguity, where we search and search for THE THING that will give meaning.

Out of money and options, Danny travels to an unnamed Eastern European country to join his cousin Howard in renovating a decrepit castle, where family secrets are dredged up in this story within a story.

The Keep is a strange book, and I’m still not sure how I felt about it. What drew me in was the gothic setting, which Egan’s prose brings to life. It is situated on a mountaintop overlooking a quaint, Old World village, and it contains a tower called the keep, inhabited by a crazy, ancient baroness who is the last of the family that originally owned the castle and who refuses to leave; a murky pool where twin children were said to have drowned, which may be inhabited by ghosts; and a maze of tunnels underneath that include a torture show more chamber complete with manacled skeletons. It all sounds a bit too much, but Egan is playing with us, as we soon discover. For Danny’s story is actually an assignment that a guy named Ray is writing for a class he is taking at the prison where he is incarcerated.

So what is real, and what isn’t real? Egan doesn’t tell us. Danny’s story gets more and more surreal, as he first falls out of a window and suffers a head injury, then tries to get away from the castle and fails. (By the way, why do these surreal journeys always take place in Central European locations? I believe this is the third novel I’ve read with that premise.) I did find Danny’s story and the castle more compelling than Ray’s story and the prison, and it is Danny’s story that keeps me reading.

At the end, I think Egan gives us enough information to formulate some answers. I won’t divulge my thinking, because that would be too spoiler-y, but for me, the ending was a bit too on the nose. Overall, though, I liked the book, and I was interested in what Egan was trying to do. She may not have completely pulled off the experimental aspects of the novel, but at least she was willing to play with the narrative structure, and for what it’s worth, she nailed the gothic nature of the story. She could have stuck to that, and this would have been a very entertaining book. show less

Sometimes craft works to transport the reader and sometimes it isolates. That’s how it felt toward the end of this book, however much I enjoyed it until that point. There’s a deliberate conceit that works on some levels - that prisoner Ray is telling the story of Danny and Howard; their past and their present, and that he’s looking for the approval of his writing teacher Holly; a woman who is drawn to Ray, but keeps herself apart, he’s a prisoner after all. That’s how the narrative is split; Danny’s escalating predicament at the castle, Ray’s precarious situation in prison and Holly at the end, trying to hold on to her family and herself. It should work. It should hook me and make me care, but I saw through it to the show more writer and the illusion fractured.

Spoilers.

Maybe it’s because I read A Visit from the Goon Squad first; a novel full of the author’s idea of what makes a novel “different”. It’s quirky for quirky’s sake as much as I liked the interweaving stories. And that’s how this felt. That the writer was having me on and laughing; that she couldn’t just write a straight-up book and keep everyone interested. She had to do weird stuff instead, a la John Fowles, but not as impenetrably elegant as he did it. Especially when in the Howard/Danny story Ray turns out to be Mick and has shot Danny only to have some semi-mystical thing happen where he seems to be also looking out of Danny’s eyes. It’s a vehicle in more than one sense; one to close a circle in the two stories and also I think it was the mechanism for Ray and Davis’s escape from jail. There wasn’t a whole lot said about that other than the fact of it and Holly comes under some scrutiny for her involvement with Ray. The ending is oddly fey for what has come before; Holly deciding to check into the hotel that is now finished and called The Keep. She’s searching for Ray, hoping he’ll show up there and when she doesn’t find him off the bat she thinks that the pool holds the key and her dive is the last scene.

The mystical aspect of the story didn’t work for me. It’s as if the complexity of the plot got the better of the writer and she didn’t know how to tie things up. Iain Pears would have known and so I can’t do more than give Egan props for trying. show less