Jennifer Egan

I became an admirer of Egan’s work from her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. Her writing crackles and illumines, it’s a virtuoso performance. Her prose is faceted and polished and daring – and really I like it a lot more than is good for me.

“I haven’t had trouble with writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, clichéd writing, outright flailing around.”

I can see traces of this approach in some of the stories. Sometimes the prose feels like it has been lopped of adjectives and adverbs so as to imbue events with a sense of mystery. “The Stylist” – a story about a glamour photo shoot, springs to mind.

“She stretches out beside him under the twisting fan. It reminds her of scissors. They do not touch.”

That must have been a good deal longer in the first draft, I thought to myself, even before I read the interview with Egan quoted above.

Egan is hugely impressive in this collection in the way she can take on widely different characters. A stressed husband, a religiously-inclined teenage girl, a late-thirties stylist, children and adults — Egan has equal insight into divergent angles on the world.

The title story is about a small-town young man, Rory, in the big apple. He works as an assistant to a well-known photographer – an alpha photographer with the godly power to create stars. Rory’s girlfriend is beautiful and limber, but seems to be failing as a model because she is too methodical and can’t accept that it’s all a matter of chance. A talent-spotter tells her she’s not ugly enough, that beauty today is ugly beauty, gorgeous monsters.

Now this environment sounds like promising ground for an article in Womens Way rather than for a short story. Will the reader really care that this young woman experiences an epiphany where she realises that she has wider ambitions than to be a model?
Well, yes, when Egan writes the story. It doesn’t seem she’s using the photo model scenario to impress the reader with an insider look at life in glamour / or to show how shallow it all is. Readers who pick up collections of short stories are generally not looking for that.

I’m halfway through, and as often with short stories, I might leave the rest for another few months or even a year. The book will loiter on the kitchen table, laundry basket, floor, kitchen worktop, and toilet cistern until I finish it and at last it will find a place on the shelf. Either that or someone will hide it.