Jennifer Egan wants to save literary fiction from itself

I’m supposed to notice Jennifer Egan’s age and look (59, extremely pretty). She’s heat and humorous, deeply charming. We met on a kind of March days that supplied that first breath of spring. We had a decent window — she needed to get house to her mother who had simply flown in — and afterward I anxious I’d requested not one of the proper profile questions. I had no thought how she felt about being the mom of younger grownup sons throughout the pandemic. I didn’t ask the place she writes or what she eats when she does. As an alternative, we walked circles round Manhattan’s East Village, speaking about what fiction is likely to be price.

In a second of cultural wariness of the novel — evident within the proliferation of narrowly constructed autofiction and the supremacy of tv — Egan stays a real believer. It’s the factor that struck me, rereading her work. Her books are crammed with artifice, gadgets, doubles, spies and sinking ships. “I consider in novels very a lot,” she stated. “I additionally actually know that unhappiness, loving one thing whose cultural energy is waning, however I’m not giving up.”

The uncommon author for whom every guide has been a completely totally different gambit, Egan has frequently labored to stretch what each the novel and the novelist are able to. She’s written a coming-of-age and a gothic novel. She as soon as described the picture she held in her thoughts whereas writing her novel “Take a look at Me,” a couple of mannequin, an adolescent and a terrorist, as a determine eight. “Manhattan Seaside,” the 2017 historic novel that performs it straightest — her uncle cherished it; “I’ve by no means heard from him about different books” — felt like a departure as a result of it was so acquainted. However for Egan, it was nonetheless a proper stretch and, she says, the hardest to write down.

But it was her 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel-in-stories “A Go to From the Goon Squad” that catapulted an already superb profession into the stratosphere. Maybe greatest identified (at the least in circles of writers) for its chapter-as-PowerPoint presentation, it felt thrilling not as a result of slideshows have been significantly new in 2010 however as a result of the guide was in a position to synthesize this oddity of life again into artwork. Critics and readers like to pronounce the loss of life of the novel, however “Goon Squad” — with all its formal acrobatics and jumps in time and viewpoint, imbued so absolutely with our personal yearnings — emphasised the shape’s vitality.

“The Sweet Home,” out this week, expands the world of “Goon Squad.” It’s half sequel and half prequel, nevertheless it’s not a return; Egan by no means left. An early chapter dates again to 2010, she informed me: “Lulu the Spy” was printed by the New Yorker as “Black Field” in 2012. And for a yr and a half, she labored on “Manhattan Seaside” and “Sweet Home” concurrently — till “it turned clear that ‘Manhattan Seaside’ would require all of my time.”

Whereas the concept of a sequel would possibly really feel shocking to those that affiliate Egan’s work with innovation, the truth that she wished to dive deeper into the world that proved essentially the most elastic makes a superb quantity of sense. Returning to the identical folks gave her room to stretch them too: “I’m actually within the ways in which we’re such a mixture of contradictory qualities; the exact same particular person is heroic and terribly egocentric.”

“Sweet Home” fleshes out characters we solely bought glimpses of in “Goon Squad,” nevertheless it additionally supplied Egan the chance to write down a spy chapter, invent a brand new know-how and construct tales by way of emails and tweets. It’s price noting that — not like latest books which have sought to duplicate the very on-line expertise — none of those learn like tweets or emails: They learn like story. That is the joys of each “Goon Squad” and “Sweet Home”: They exploit this new and unusual materials, however their biggest pleasures really feel explicit to books.

One other novel twist within the service of old school storytelling is available in “Sweet Home’s” sci-fi flourish. In “Goon Squad,” Bix Bouton was the Black boyfriend to Lizzie; evading her racist dad and mom, he wandered town and finally met up with two far more distinguished characters on a fateful day. Within the new novel, Bix, now heart stage, invents a panopticon, Personal Your Unconscious, which permits one to enter different folks’s reminiscences. In Egan’s arms, it’s a pink herring, proof that the dream of understanding all is a hole phantasm. It’s not dystopian precisely — it’s too enjoyable and fleshy for that — however it’s, in a means, a warning.

“I assume to do one thing absolutely, you must consider it should change all the things,” Egan stated. “And I, for some purpose, have a delusionary means to suppose that about what I’m engaged on.” I requested how she offers with the frustration of returning to a world unchanged by her work. “It’s simply the sensation of getting it proper.”

For Egan, getting it proper has to do with fulfilling a reader’s craving — the phrase “craving” seems within the first line of “Sweet Home” and the final chapter of “Goon Squad” — for thriller and creativeness, versus the barrage of knowledge, the a lot emptier imagistic titillations, that we discover a lot simpler to entry.

Our stroll led us to the East River, the place building pressured us throughout a collection of footbridges. Egan appeared to stifle a want to choose up items of trash. We saved circling the identical constellation of phrases: creativeness, data, pleasure, authenticity. She informed me concerning the “layers of readers” she makes use of to verify she is providing the meant expertise. “My purpose is to offer pleasure, actually,” she stated. “I really like listening to that folks miss subway stops” studying her work.

Along with fiction, Egan believes in one other barely outmoded idea: the human creativeness. “I believe we will do something,” she stated. She was speaking about story but additionally about vaccines and antibiotics. As a kind of novelists who has not at all times had as a lot religion in fiction or in folks, I pressed her to elucidate. Abashedly, I introduced up a podcast I’d been listening to, about Ukraine. (Egan just isn’t a giant fan of podcasts; she listens largely to 18th century novels.) I’d heard the historian Timothy Snyder speaking concerning the particularity of this second having much less to do with impending disaster than with the sensation of being doomed to stagnation, unable to think about what else is likely to be attainable.

“One of many paradoxes that led me into the ‘Sweet Home’ is the truth that we appear to not have the ability to predict something,” says Jennifer Egan.

(Pieter M. van Hattem)

“One of many paradoxes that led me into the ‘Sweet Home’ is the truth that we appear to not have the ability to predict something,” she stated. “Regardless of the quantity of knowledge we’ve got, we didn’t know Trump was going to get elected. We didn’t know 9/11 was going to occur.” The paradox is the glut of knowledge and the dearth of remark. “I believe the media saturation … creates a distortion, which is it’s essential to be the middle of a universe. You should create a universe that revolves round you. And in case you don’t succeed at that, you’re invisible and powerless.”

This felt linked to a lot latest fiction centered on the “I,” but additionally to the self-torture of scrolling one’s telephone in the course of the night time as a result of what if yet another tweet would possibly in some way inform us how we would survive?

There’s a personality in “Sweet Home” who yells randomly in public in an try to entry authenticity, to drive folks to extra absolutely inhabit the world. “His purpose was to create a disruption so excessive that it jolted real responses,” Egan writes. This feels near what she does in her work: to not mirror the world, however to harness the large energy of fiction, in all its guises, in an effort to drive us to cease and have a look at it.

“One factor I actually have felt as I become old is that, in the long run, artwork is the factor that lasts,” she stated, “as a result of it finally ends up being the artifact. It’s the seashells which are left after all the things is gone. I imply, how a lot do we all know concerning the data of Hadrian’s reign in Rome? However the artwork is there.” It’s the sensation that is still.

Robust is a critic and the creator, most not too long ago, of the novel “Need.”