The Myriad Faces of Rage

The characters in Jennifer Egan's intriguing new novel Look at Me (Doubleday; 415 pages; $24.95) grope for something substantial in the blizzard of images and information that make up contemporary life. At the center is Charlotte Swenson, an aging fashion model whose face must be reconstructed, with 80 titanium screws, after a pulverizing car accident. Though she looks perfectly normal, her former cronies in Manhattan's trendy night spots no longer recognize her, and her old life of amped-up photo shoots and weekends spent adorning the yachts of rich men slips away.

Meanwhile, back in Swenson's hometown of Rockford, Ill., another Charlotte, the plain teenage daughter of Swenson's childhood friend, drifts between an affair with a mysterious math teacher, an older man of shifting and suspect identity, and study sessions with her uncle, a history professor. The latter's vision of a post-industrial America infatuated with "a headlong forward motion that was inherently catastrophic" nudges him toward madness. The math teacher is eventually revealed to be a terrorist "sleeper" gone awol, an ominous visitor from an unnamed part of the world filled with "dust, rage, starved zealous faces, languages he had trained himself not to think in anymore," a man once--and perhaps still--intent on disrupting what he calls "the American conspiracy." He probably seemed merely unsettling to Egan while she was writing the novel but now, in the wake of Sept. 11, he is instantly menacing.

An unlikely blend of tabloid luridness and brainy cultural commentary, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Awards, is held together by the voice of the elder Charlotte, corrosively cynical yet fearless in her honesty. She is the sort of woman who, as her career and its privileges evaporate, can calmly observe, "We are interchangeable--the first lesson one learns as a professional beauty." She asks, "How could I resist the offer of attention and money, the very polestars whose gleaming emanations had navigated my existence?" when she's approached by a creepy website that stage manages events in the lives of "ordinary people" so it can offer phony documentaries about them on the Internet. Her answer to that final question, as much as the novel's uncanny prescience, gives Look at Me a rare urgency.