Lou throws back her head, startling her father. Lou is in his late thirties, square-jawed surfer’s face gone a little draggy under the eyes. “You were married to Mom on that trip,” she informs him, her voice distorted by the arching of her neck, which is encircled by a puka-shell choker.
“Yes, Charlie,” Lou says, “I’m aware of that.”

It’s fast-moving yet dense. I love the intertwining of movement, sound and meaning. It’s a synthesis of sense impressions. The characters are revealed in perfectly-focussed snapshots. (Which will maybe annoy readers with expectations of a novel’s depth and character development.)

Lou also makes an appearance in 3 Ask Me if I Care, set maybe 5 years later, in teen-land of final school year. It’s appropriately breathless and sprinkled with “and he goes, like, and I go”. The title says it all actually.

Hey, Lou goes. He leans down so our faces are together, and stares straight into my eyes. He looks tired, like someone walked on his skin and left footprints. He goes, The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Don’t listen to them – listen to me.
And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen.

Lou is a manipulator, preys on teen girls, passes around cocaine. Yet what he says seems real.

Story 5 is set some 25 years later, when the girls are now 43 and Lou is an old man dying of cancer. It’s narrated by Jocelyn, who had been Lou’s schoolgirl lover and wasted years on him.

It’s a brave leap forward in time and almost doomed to failure. I mean, what connection can there be between the 17 year-old kids and these women (Jocelyn and Rhea) with teenage children of their own? Sure, the connection is there, inside, but it’s not to be revealed in a 10 minute scene. “We know him from a time when there was no such thing as normal people dying” says Jocelyn.

But a little later we get this amazing thought from Jocelyn, just dropped in without context:

The whole time, Rhea what she was doing. Even dancing, even sobbing. Even with a needle in her vein, she was half pretending. Not me.

This knocked me over. It captures something essential about the seduction of the rock n’roll ‘religion’. Be yourself, be authentic, live fast, flaunt the rules – whatever way it is expressed. But those with nothing else in their lives who took this as their sole guidance got smashed on the rocks.

6 X’s and O’s
Is about the musician Scotty, who became a loner and eccentric while his friend Bennie went on to become a famous record producer. This story was a little annoying, as Egan focuses on Scotty’s eccentricities and there’s no real sense of what has brought him to this state. Even so, some startling great writing. Actually, the story is only weak in comparison with some of the others.

In 7 A to B Stephanie and Bennie move into an upper middle class suburb. The ‘society novel’ initial part of this story is not as convincing.
You have to admire Egan though, for trying out various angles and styles. 10 is narrated in the second person (you), 3 is girly teenager fast-speak, 9 is a confessional letter from an ex-journalist and convicted rapist, and 12 is a Powerpoint presentation!
Story 7 moves on to the PR world, and Steph’s boss La Doll, which is where Egan is more at home.

La Doll was one of those people who seem, even to those who know them well, digitally enhanced: the bright blond bob cut; the predatory lipstick; the roving, algorithmic eyes.

8 Selling the General
This one irritated me at first. I thought it was too much in-your-face. But that was because I was expecting another dose of finely-chiselled realism. Instead what you get here is close to farce.

It’s about a publicist – La Doll / Dolly – who takes on the job of softening the image of a genocidal general. Dolly’s first plan of action is to have the general wear a hat. After a shaky start, this begins to work. After a few weeks the general’s personal secretary rings again: “The general pays you each month a sum,” he said. “That is not for one idea only.” And so the pressure is on Dolly. The way forward is revealed in a dream one night.

It’s a story that would be fun to argue about with another reader. One side (me) will say it’s OTT, the other (someone who works in the PR industry) will say it’s straight-forward realism, and that once Egan had chosen the setting of the publicity world, farce is the inevitable genre of the story.

Here too the writing always twists with surprises.
“Entering Lulu’s bedroom, Dolly felt like Dorothy waking up in Oz: everything was in colour.”

Her stories/chapters are endlessly inventive. Each has enough inventiveness to spawn a whole novel. And in each separate story there are throwaway asides that could form the nucleus of a perfect short story. As in 10 Out of Body where Sasha convinces a square-looking fellow student to become her ‘pretend boyfriend’ as her father has hired a private detective to make sure she has a stable lifestyle while at college. The reader quickly suspects there is no spying detective, but the episode is tightly related in a few paragraphs and then the story skips back to the present. This is a great idea that could have been drawn out to be a whole story in itself.

“Sasha kept glancing around, and you figured she was thinking about the detective, so you put your arm around her and kissed the side of her face and her hair, which had a burned smell, the not-realness of it all relaxing you in a way you’d never managed to be with girls at him.”

Oh yeah, it’s in the second person – more experimentation with form.

Then to top it all the last story is set in the future. And no, Egan doesn’t shy away from mentioning new technologies just as in the most unapologetic genre sci-fi.