An Interview with Jennifer Egan c/o Seattle PI
Sped through Egan's latest in a day (hey don't get impressed yet - a whole section was Power Point slides). I didn't know if I'd like her, but since she's piling on top of the literary apocalyptic depression (we're all gonna die, politics are crazy, texting is brainwashing us!), it's worth reading as a litmus test of the next phase in literature.
There are two characters to keep an eye on - Sasha and Bennie. Sasha is a semi-gorgeous klepto. Bennie is a hairy music CEO who has a gold habit. Yes, he puts gold flakes on his tongue. Besides these tidbits, nothing much happens to them, they're just pulled along by their character flaws. They go exactly where you expect them. What's interesting is the Pig-Pen-esque clouds of characters they drag along with them. From punk kids in San Francisco to a safari group witnessing a lion pride to a massacring general meeting a movie star, there's never a dull moment.
Now, the real bone of the book is the Power Point. Some grad student will incorporate this into their thesis someday. I think Plascencia is a good example of an avant-garde fiction writer - he has a character in The People of Paper, Baby Nostradamus, that only speaks in black boxes. Also, Plascencia makes you turn the book every which way to read the paragraphs alotted to each character.
I'm not quite convinced of Power Point as literature, but I'm sure text-novels and multimedia-novels are here to stay. Whether they'll be a phase or not is still uncertain.
