Look at Me
A Novel

Name: Look at Me
Brand: Blackstone Audiobooks
Availability: InStock
Rating: 4 (3 reviews)
Author: Jennifer Egan
ISBN: 9781609988166

Author: Jennifer Egan

Narrator: Rachel Warren

Unabridged: 20 hr 1 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing

Published: 02/01/2012

Categories: Fiction

Synopsis

At the start of this edgy and ambitiously multilayered novel, a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes eighty titanium screws to reassemble it. She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied. With the surreal authority of a David Lynch, Jennifer Egan threads Charlotte’s narrative with those of other casualties of our infatuation with the image. There’s a deceptively plain teenage girl embarking on a dangerous secret life, an alcoholic private eye, and an enigmatic stranger who changes names and accents as he prepares an apocalyptic blow against American society. As these narratives inexorably converge, Look at Me becomes a coolly mesmerizing intellectual thriller of identity and imposture.

About Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan, the author of several books of fiction, is the recipient of the 2019 New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association’s 2019 Legacy Award for lifetime achievement. Her works including the New York Times bestseller Manhattan Beach, as well as A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Books Critics Circle Award; The Keep, a national bestseller; the story collection Emerald City; Look at Me, a National Book Award finalist; and The Invisible Circus, which was adapted into a major motion picture. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, McSweeney’s, the New York Times Magazine, and many others.

Reviews

Goodreads review by karen on June 16, 2020

yay! friends read books togeeeether! and now i can finally link our reviews! i wish i had read this when it first came out. and i am mad at myself for not loving this book as much as everyone else seems to have - when i read other reviews of it, i am jealous that it didn't grip me as much as it did o......more

Goodreads review by Greg on September 24, 2012

Karen and I read this book at roughly the same time. Read her review here. Look at Me I'm giving a weak four stars, if there were half-stars it would be a three and a half. Right after I finished reading this I started Egan's collection of short stories Emerald City, and I'm happy I gave Look at Me f......more

Goodreads review by Edan on July 01, 2012

Re-reading! *** I am so hot for Jennifer Egan right now. As I read this book (about a whole lot more than a model who gets a new face after a car accident, by the way), I often had to stop and admire the fluidity of Egan's narrative, how she moved in and out of action, in and out of flashback, in and......more

Goodreads review by Simon on January 09, 2012

A massively over-written novel which would have benefited from a less wordy author and/or a competent editor. Egan never bothers to use one word where sixteen flowery, uber-lyrical, overblown words will do. Convoluted sentences and showy vocabulary add little - indeed, they become nugatory and self-......more

Goodreads review by Vonia on April 23, 2018

"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." Where to begin. I read Egan's Pulitzer Prize winning book and was not impresse......more

Quotes

“Intriguing…An unlikely blend of tabloid luridness and brainy cultural commentary…The novel’s uncanny prescience gives Look at Me a rare urgency.” Time

“Ambitious, swiftly paced…Egan writes with such shimmering élan that it’s easy to follow her cast on its journey.” Wall Street Journal

“Dark, hugely ambitious, riveting as a roadside wreck—and noxiously, scathingly funny.” Elle

“Egan limns the mysteries of human identity and the stranglehold our image-obsessed culture has on us all in this complicated and wildly ambitious novel.” Newsweek

“Comic, richly imagined, and stunningly written…An energetic, unorthodox, quintessentially American vision of America.” The New Yorker

“Brilliantly unnerving…A haunting, sharp, splendidly articulate novel.” New York Times

“This is a masterfully plotted, unceasingly dramatic novel whose thrilling and provocative power lies in its hard-edged mirroring of our franchised, online, and wildly decadent world.” Booklist (starred review)

Awards

Electric Literature