She is, at heart, a comic novelist, and while she writes across wildly different genres, a sense of the absurd is common to all her work, and the way she sees the world. In 2018, she won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for her next book, Manhattan Beach. In 2011, she won both a Pulitzer prize and a National Book Critics Circle award for her fourth novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, a freewheeling meditation on time and music which followed a collection of dropouts and survivors loosely orbiting ageing punk rocker turned record producer Bennie Salazar and his assistant Sasha. Her novels, short stories and journalism are heavily decorated. I think we underestimate the degree to which the change we experience is what it’s always been like for human beings.”įor Egan, finding patterns in those changes is part of a life’s work, and she has become one of the preeminent American writers of the last 30 years. And yet, 20 or 30 years later, there were cars. She is obsessed, for example, with the 1870s, “an amazing decade, because, except for the telegraph, almost none of the inventions we take for granted now – electricity, say – existed yet. She is highly attuned to the falsifying effects of nostalgia, complacency, solipsism and ignorance of history, and to the delusions of uniqueness that dog every age.
It’s the condition in which most of us live – after a while, we stop seeing our surroundings – and one against which Egan’s skill as a novelist is set. There are moments when I think: is that happening now?” “What really made it gloomy – and I’m very conscious of this – was that the family who’d lived here, the child had grown up, the parents had gotten old, and I think they’d stopped seeing it. Remembering how it was fills the 59-year-old novelist with a peculiar and very specific dread.
#Mj human nature this is it full
“There were holes in the floor and the walls were drab,” says Egan, sitting in the kitchen of what is now a beautifully renovated property, full of lovely art and restored period details. The owners were an elderly couple, and the place was distressed. W hen Jennifer Egan bought her house in Brooklyn 20 years ago, it had been on the market for eight months.