Look At Me

Look At Me is a serpentine novel driven by ideas, theories about identity and modernity and the urban-rural rift in culture. This is not to say that the storyline is sufficiently lacking, just that the concepts brought up by Moose and elder Charlotte's narration are enough to write a philosophy thesis on. Jennifer Egan emphasizes the room for reinvention and dishonesty in the world of her second novel.

"After the accident, I became less visible. I don't mean in the obvious sense that I went to fewer parties and retreated from general view. Or not just that. I mean that after the accident, I became more difficult to see."

"The experience of that memory was like being hit, or kissed, unexpectedly. I blinked to recover from it."

"We talked about losing our virginity--not losing it, though, with all the haplessness that word implied, but yielding it up in a blaze of ecstasy that would leave us permanently altered."

"We sipped the dry, cold beers. It was so warm, we no longer needed our jackets. We were fresh and clean, yet from somewhere within us--below us, it almost seemed, down among the dead Swedes--came a weight that was palpable. The weight of our boredom, our impatience."

"Still, the intensity was punishing--we're killing each other, I thought. We're killing something."

"Why didn't I urge my friends to bring me casseroles and groceries and lounge with me on my sectional couch? Because I was weak. Oh, yes, that is the time when you need people most, I assured myself as the silence thumped at my ears. But you have to resist. Because once they've seen you like this, once they've witnessed your dull, uneven hair and raspy voice, your hesitancy and cringing need for love, your smell--the smell of your weakness!--they'll never forget, and long after you've regained your vitality, after you yourself have forgotten those exhibits of your weakness, they'll look at you and still see them."

"'But how long can it last, this reality thing?'"

"I'd been a safe-sex practioner since before the phrase existed, not for health reasons so much as a basic squeamishness at the idea of mingling cells. Embracing, kissing--even the grittier exchanges I had no problem with, but the things I couldn't see, the molecules and atoms--those should stay apart, I felt."

"I kept conversation to a minimum; if I let it go on long, I'd found, the man ceased to be attractive no matter what he looked like."

"We were strangers, with nothing to hide from each other."

"It was 10:30 A.M. and I was hugely drunk, full of joy and purpose and mischief. My only regret was over all the days of my life I'd spent sober. Why, when drinking wasn't illegal? Why had I deprived myself?"

"The silence between us felt endless, multigenerational, a silence in which I was fully aware of the earth turning slowly on its spit."

"I lied a lot, and with good reason: to protect the truth--safeguard it, like wearing fake gems to keep the real ones from getting stolen, or cheapened by overuse. I guarded what truths I possessed because information was not a thing--it was colorless, odorless, shapeless, and therefore indestructible. There was no way to retrieve or void it, no way to halt its proliferation. Telling someone a secret was like storing plutonium inside a sandwich bag; the information would inevitably outlive the friendship or love or trust in which you'd placed it. And then you would have given it away."

"I sensed him waiting for me to go, and yet I lingered, absurdly. Desperation upon desperation, I thought, but was too drunk to care."

"'Can you look at me and swear that everything you've said is absolutely true, that none of it is bullshit? There's no agenda hidden underneath, no ulterior motives--everything is exactly the way you've described it?'"

"He represented the last time I had believed in something that I no longer believed in."

"I had always believed my life would unfold in some more angular fashion. Instead, I'd virtually stepped from my childhood into this happiness."

"Being drunk made him feel more American."

"She was selfish, finally; selfish above all else. Nearly everyone was."

"There was a freshness in leaving behind one life for the next, a raw, tingling sensation that was one step short of pain. An imperative of the mind and spirit had reshaped the facts of his life like tides rearranging a shore."

"People were vines awaiting the chance to cling."

"Dreams were a problem--not only did they curdle his nights, but at times left a troubling residue that touched his days. He preferred not to dream at all."

"He felt an impulse to protect her, shield her from some proximate and overwhelming danger. But there was only himself."

"Being discovered felt like a discovery."

"'Don't you think it would be so amazing for girls to get regular surgeries on their faces so they'd always look different?' he asked. 'Like once a year, at least. I mean this changing the hair color every five months is so tired. Blond, black, blond, red--like oh, you're such a chameleon! I'm really into tissue, you know, the real human being.'"

"What was this feeling inside of me? I wondered. Peace of mind, but without the drunkenness. Peace of mind, but with something added; energy, maybe. I thought it might be happiness."

"'But if what happens next is that I write a book, won't I be writing a book about writing a book?'"

"...I thought about waiting--how vulnerable it made you. Because eventually you got tired. You got tired and you made a choice, you picked someone--or worse, someone picked you--and you believed he was the person you'd been waiting for. And you gave him everything."=

"There was a sweet, vulnerable feeling in the air, a postcoital tenderness."

"'You spend your whole life watching other people,' he said. 'I have a feeling it eats away your soul.'"

"What I loathed--what I'd always loathed--were the conversations people had tried to engage me in countless times over the years: you tell me how your father whipped you with a belt; I'll tell you how I was left to cry for hours in my room, how I wasn't allowed to play piano, how lonely and sad I felt as a child, and after that we'll be intimates, because each of us know who broke the other. There was nothing phonier in the world. It was no one's business who'd broken me; maybe I'd never been broken."

"I proceeded to the bar, ordered a double vodka and downed it. And in a single moment--the one during which I downed the drink--I traversed, with telescopic swiftness, the many gradations from mild tipsiness to staggering inebriation that I had savored at other points in my life, from fuzzy to toasted to totally gone--I swept through them all in one sip, one gulp (a gulp that encompassed a double vodka, it was true) and my arrival at the far end of the spectrum made me stagger. The room tipped on its side while my body strained to adjust to its new chemistry."

"I would submit that regardless of how many people one has touched in one's life, the very first time, whatever the occasion, is invariably interesting--to become creatures, rather than just voices and thoughts."

"If this was love, did she have it too? Did you need to say "love" for it to be love?"

"He marveled and puzzled and raged at the awful gap between his vision and other people's, at his own consistent failure to bridge it."

"Most of us are desperate for raw experience. We work in offices, dealing with intangibles; we go to lunch and talk to other people surrounded by intangibles. No one actually makes anything anymore."

"I had nothing left to sell!"

"I despised talking about myself. For years I had lied to avoid it, feinting and darting, obfuscating slyly, lying because it was easier, because I felt like it. Lying to erase the truth, though this never seemed to work. I knew I was thirty-five; I'd tried to forget, but the knowledge stayed in me. As a liar, I had failed."

"Masturbation: a word with all the sensuality of suitcases tumbling from a closet shelf, another one falling just when you think the noise has stopped. A futile and lonely act, I'd always thought, but I'd missed the boat, I decided now, misunderstood the joys to be had from declining to indroduce yet another human being into one's life."

"The past was up for sale."

"'I'm going to change,' I said stiffly. 'I'm in the process of changing.' After a moment I said, 'I've changed.'"

"'The less you say, the more excitement. This is human nature, my friend.'"

"Holding Charlotte's face, he came as near as he ever did, anymore, to feeling the rage he so desperately missed, rage and desire commingled; he imagined snapping her neck, crushing her skull between his palms, and the eroticism of that vision made him catch his breath. She had died a hundred different ways at his hands, but what he did instead was pull off her shirt and her clothes and do it that way, kill her as many times as she could take it."

"'This has nothing to do with America. We're all in here hiding from it.'"

"He took in the scene. I tried to do the same, but I couldn't see it. I'd been looking for too many years."

"We eyed each other with a pressure that was like a shove. After a while I got angry. Fuck you, I thought. But there was no backing down until he did. We're enemies. This came to me right in the middle of fucking. We'll kill each other one day."

"'I'm not saying make it up--I'm saying find the connections. Show us the buried logic. What I don't want is, I was bringing cookies to Aunt Susie and I got run over by a tractor. This is not a Raymond Carver story, if you're familiar with his work.'"

"'You're turning people into shopping malls.'"

"'See, it's the future,' he went on with a kind of apology. 'It's going to happen with or without you. But if you go with this thing, if you give yourself to it, you'll own that future; you'll be right in the heart of it.'"

"...she had stopped loving him. It amazed Anthony how distinct that feeling had been, like someone leaving a room."

"His presence made the air sing. Made me loopy. Buoyed me up on a reckless swell of freedom I hadn't felt in many years. I threw my arms around people and shouted into their ears. I jumped onto tables and danced. I expanded, trying to fill my exaggerated outline."

"'I love America. I love this crazy damn country. Where else does such beautiful insanity enter the realm of possibility?'"

"It was the reigning habit of mind in this land without history, this era when all relationships of time and space, of cause and effect, had been obliterated by the touch of a key. And so people were adrift, lacking any context by which to orient themselves, seeking to fill the breach with personal history, that diminuitive, myopic substitute."

"And information was the inversion of a thing; without shape or location of component parts. Without context. Not history but personal history."

"All you need to know is how to tell a story."

"It was a mystery why I cared--normally I was all in favor of mutual usage--but I couldn't forgive him."

"And here was the problem, here was the worry scrabbling like mice behind these brightly painted panels of picturesqueness: I was peeling apart in layers. I was breaking up into bits."

"He glanced at me, startled, then lifted the bottle again. It was the sort of drinking you really couldn't watch."

"I hadn't lain in bed with a man in so long: even a comatose one would be a luxury."

"An object was lodged in my chest, caught there; a fist-sized object that had to be expelled, an object consisting of words, a very small handful of words. I didn't want to say them. I was afraid to."

"There, I thought. it's gone. I said it and it's done, it's gone.
But of course it wasn't gone. It was indestructible."

"Simple things were becoming so much harder to do."

"A world remade by circuitry was a world without history or context or meaning, and because we are what we see, we are what we see, such a world was certainly headed toward death."

"I felt bad in a way that I associated with coming down from drugs. A glittering apparatus, dismantled piece by piece."

"It seemed perfect that we die together. A monument to the randomness and desperation that had united us."

"Life can't be sustained under the pressure of so many eyes."