Keep On Keepin' On

The Keep
by Jennifer Egan

Any critic will tell you that the thing that sucks about the profession is that a critic can't turn off the critical thinking. Sure, there are movie reviewers who will write, "It's a good popcorn movie," or music critics who will write, "Don't think about it, just turn it up!" but that kind of language just serves to underscore how hard they're trying to make it look like they're not trying. It's sort of patronizing, really, like saying: "If you are dumb, you will enjoy this honestly. Alas I cannot, though I try!"

Me, I fell into writing criticism because I think like a critic anyway. Many times I've annoyed friends after a movie or a performance by systematically picking apart something that they had enjoyed. Maybe it was too much watching "Siskel & Ebert" with my dad when I was a kid, I don't know. It just seems that I can barely remember a time when I sat through a movie or listened to a piece of music or read a book without taking mental note of what worked and what didn't.

Anyway, "The Keep" is the best new novel I've read in a long time and I don't have to qualify it or anything. I don't even want to tell you much about it. I'll just say that it starts off as a sort of Gothic horror story and then quickly introduces meta-fiction elements. So,if you think like a critic, you'll start thinking, "Oh, this is just a Gothic horror story. I know where this is going." But then it suddenly introduces something completely different. What's great is that it introduces the modernistic stuff in a way that's almost seamless, always clear and fits well with the themes introduced in the Gothic storyline. And it doesn't sacrifice on the Gothic stuff, either. I'll just stop here. Go read it.