rev. of Emerald City by Jennifer Egan
Emerald City
Stories by Jennifer Egan. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $22.50 cloth. Reviewed by Jodee Stanley.
In the title story of Jennifer Egan’s collection,
Emerald City, a young photographer’s assistant walks down the streets of Manhattan with his girlfriend, an unsuccessful model. He takes in the street noise, the dark storefronts, looking for something that will ground him in this scene, which is at once familiar and elusive. Then, when he catches their reflection in a windowpane, it strikes him “that this was New York: a place that glittered from a distance even when you reached it.”
In this and other stories, Egan writes with glorious clarity about people seeking to transcend their present situations; in the end, however, they tend to arrive at places that are more imagined than real, their longing revealed as naïveté or nostalgia. In “Sacred Heart,” a Catholic school student envisions the “dark and troubled life” of a classmate who has run away from home. When she finds her friend downtown, working in a discount shoestore, she is dismayed: “I still clung to the vague belief that she had risen above the earth and now lived among those fat, silvery clouds I’d seen from airplane windows. What I felt, seeing her, was a jolt of disappointment.”
Several of the stories are set in foreign locales, while others take place in more familiar settings: San Francisco, suburban Illinois. Whether the backdrop is exotic or humble, Egan uses her extraordinary craft to bring the reader into the intimate landscape of her characters — both the physical and psychological worlds in which they live. In “Puerto Vallarta,” a young girl who has discovered her father’s infidelity searches for a way to recover her respect for him on a family vacation to Mexico. In “The Watch Trick,” a casual boat ride on Lake Michigan ends in a scuffle between old friends, when jealousies surface and a past betrayal is revealed. And in the brilliant story “Why China?” a businessman takes his family to the Xi’an province as he tries to distance himself from allegations of fraud back in the U.S. Traveling through the alien and enchanting Chinese countryside, he confronts the hollowness of the affluent life he has created, and the uncertainty of what will follow as it crumbles. “The land
got very strange. Gray hills bulged from the earth in such a way that their middles looked wider than their bases. . . . I stared out the window at the weird hills and told myself that we lived in San Francisco, in a house on Washington Street that I’d bought for a million in cash six years ago, that our house existed right now, the burglar alarm on, automatic sprinklers set to keep the garden alive. It’s all still there, I thought. Waiting. But I didn’t believe it.”
In her acclaimed debut novel
The Invisible Circus, Egan demonstrated her talent for storytelling with remarkably fluid and assured prose. In
Emerald City, she reaches beyond her first book, giving us stories that don’t simply ring with truth, but shimmer with it. All the characters in her collection look for a moment when everything will come together — the last, mysterious piece of the puzzle — and of course, most are heartbroken. But others briefly, tantalizingly peek at perfection, “and for a moment the world ignites, it blazes around them with exquisite radiance. Each detail is right.”
