The Keep

by Jennifer Egan

Award-winning author Jennifer Egan brilliantly conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep-–the tower, the last stand-–is both everything worth protecting and the very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive.

Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results. And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story that seamlessly brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Horror, Gothic, Literary Fiction, Novels, Audiobook

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times book prize, and was named one of the best books of the decade by Time Magazine and Entertainment Weekly. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine, and she recently completed a term as President of PEN America. Her new novel, The Candy House, a sibling to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was published in April, 2022, and was recently named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022, as well as one of President Obama’s favorite reads of 2022.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

god, i am so glad jennifer egan won the pulitzer. when i heard she won, i said "her??"



because i had read invisible circus and thought it was really average and not to my liking at all. but then i read goon squad, for science, which made me read this one, and i loved them both. and now i say loudly "HER!"

this one has similarities to goon squad (and thankfully none to invisible circus). it is a weaving narrative swirling metafictionally between a criminal writing a story for his prison writing class and a man visiting his estranged cousin in a broken-down castle somewhere in eastern europe; a castle that is slowly being renovated into a hotel... and something more.

and then there is our narrator.

this book is a creeper. both stories are individually marvelous, and when they converge, it is like the angelic choir going "ahhhhhh" in a way that is completely satisfying and chilly. is it perfect? no, there are some questions i am still having at the end of it, but enough of it works that i love it to little pieces, and was squeeing most of the time i was reading it. it combines the gothic sensibilities with a mystery that is at once a mystery of real-world dimensions, and a mystery of the miiiind.

it is about technology and imagination and how the one impacts the other. it is about childhood mistakes and the ways in which adulthood can be resisted. it is about atonement. it is about enduring the aftershocks of decisions regretted.

and it is beautiful.

i, for one, did not mind the last chapter. many people did. but that story, the beginning of it anyway, felt so necessary to me. the very-end i can see is not as strong as the rest of the book, but the words leading up to it are some of the most heart-wrenching in the whole book.

i love stories-within-stories and i love the gothic settings, so this was pretty much a guaranteed win for me. and i am officially a big fan of jennifer egan, and am going to read look at me before the year is out. count on it.

come to my blog!

[Sean · Rating 1 out of 5]

i thought this was the most criminally over-hyped and misrepresented book of last year. clearly, Jennifer Egan has many well-placed friends (and fellow back scratchers) at the NY Times Book Section to fawningly and falsely fan the flames for this book. "The Keep" is two half-fleshed out novellas awkwardly crammed together. with a tacked-on third short story/chapter at the end.

i cannot believe that any accomplished and previously published author would look at this fragmentary and sloppy work and say: "Yes, I'm finished! I'm confident I've told a compelling and fully realized story!" what? seemingly important elements and potential subplots are mentioned several times, only to be completely abandoned; characters given prominence only to be completely inconsequential to whatever plot is supposed to be going on. but oh yeah, it's 'meta', it doesn't have to be coherent. whatev.

Entertainment Weekly gave it a deserved "D": http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,12198...

i'm only glad i got this one from the library and didn't plunk down money to have my time so wasted. to be fair, i do think she is a decent writer. some turns of phrase and concise descriptions are nice. (and apparently "Look at Me" is great.) but this is just laughably unfinished. the only brightside is that it's really fast reading. she should be embarrassed that so many people paid $25 hardcover for this though. i would.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

My review of this book will sound like it deserves more stars than I've given it, because overall, I only found one flaw in this fine homage to ghost stories and their tellers. Unfortunately, it's a major one, though I'm sure some will read right past it without so much as a blip. Egan sets up two fascinating threads, that of two cousins coming together in adulthood to play out the effects of a long-held secret between them, and the prisoner crafting their tale while taking a writing class from a woman he wants to impress. Both worlds are vividly evoked, and the two central figures both haunted in ways that play out to page-turning effects. The one flaw is how Egan makes these narratives collide in the book's climax. To me, it feels rushed and therefore contrived in a way the rest of the book is not, which is no small feat considering the overused elements she's working with: the prisoner with the heart of gold, the haunted castle in a remote village, and the more recently overused element, the writer of the story being in the novel (see Atonement, The History of Love, The Blind Assassin, et al.). And it's really too bad that she made that choice, because in every other way, I loved this book, its love for writing and storytelling, the way it shows us what it really means to be haunted in modern society. And especially the final chapter, which solidifies that latter theme in a beautifully lyric voice that haunts the reader long after it's done.

[mark monday · Rating 2 out of 5]

Egan studies the effects that trauma and loneliness have on the forlorn homo sapien, forever living in the past, bound by the past, enacting the past all over again. What is a keep but a fortress? And what does one do with emotions perhaps best left unexamined? They are put away, imprisoned. And so this study of loneliness and the gaps & traps that hinder human connection features both fortress and prison. Egan tells her tale in three threads: the story of the keep and the story of the prison intertwining, their tragic protagonists connected in the worst sort of way; a story of an emotional and mental prison that entraps the story's third protagonist follows upon their heels. The author plays with time and narrative, genre and perspective. Genre in particular is just a trapping for her, used when needed. The most effective parts of the novel occur when her play with the gothic genre is front & center, especially a tense and emotional sequence set under the keep, when our band of characters decide to explore some recently discovered tunnels. Unfortunately, the rest of the novel was a pallid and uninvolving experience for me. Too much in its head at times. An ambitious and well-written book, but two of the three perspectives - a pretentious hipster and a snarky convict - just rubbed me the wrong way, and I really did not appreciate their company. They taught me nothing except for new ways to be annoyed. But I did like the third perspective - a young mom & teacher with problems, trying to pull her life together - and I wished the whole book was about her. Just when her adventure seems ready to begin, the book ends. Alas!

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've had this conviction for a long time that Jennifer Egan should be one of my favorite writers. She's a SHE who writes popular-but-smart contemporary fiction with ideas and experimental stuff in it. My hero!

Ex-punks from the Bay Area! A woman teaching writing in prison...?!!! It's like Jennifer Egan produces books especially for ME! Oh yes, my swooning Egan fangirl plan makes so much sense on paper... The only problem with it is that for some reason I can't stand her books. First I tried A Visit from the Good Squad and felt like I was being tortured physically, and bailed, so then I tried Look at Me, but I really hated that. I mean, hated, all the more painful because I'd so badly wanted to love it. So last night I sat down to read The Keep and swore I'd finish it if it killed me, which I did, and it didn't.

There were definitely some awesome things about this book. The spooky stuff at the castle was great, and reading one of the best and most frightening scenes last night, up alone at 2am, I got those chills -- and the book's well-described "worm" -- on a level that became hard for me to achieve by reading around the time I reached puberty. So Egan does gain a lot of my respect for that.

But the thing is that aside from these portions, I just don't enjoy her writing. There are two problems: (1) it doesn't surprise me, and (2) I don't believe it. In terms of the first, I almost always have this dull sense of overfamiliarity, sort of like the difference between touching yourself and someone else touching you. I read because I want the thrill of thoughts I never could have, and while obviously I don't actually think I could think or write like Jennifer Egan, somehow that's the sensation I get when I'm reading. Not all the time, but in general, both at the level of language and sentences, and in terms of characters and plot, I never have that awed feeling that I get with -- just throwing out a random name to represent this -- say, Steven Millhauser, where I'm just like, "HOW does this lunatic's brain even MANUFACTURE this shit??!?" While the little experimental formal things she does do help wake a girl up, the actual prose is never that exciting to me and is often the opposite (as when a character's terror is expressed by ice in his chest, or when his guts twist every few pages in fear).

I also just don't buy it. I don't believe it. I don't believe in her characters and I never stop seeing her doing research on prison life and meth addiction and I can't ever suspend my disbelief accept that it's actually real. So I never care about the characters, because I don't buy them. This book held me with its suspense about the situation -- I wanted to understand what was happening at that creepy old castle! -- but I never gave a shit if anyone in it lived or died, and while I was engaged by the more fantastic, gothic storyline, the gritty realist-ish portions just got on my nerves.

Just to be clear, this isn't supposed to be in any way a criticism of Egan, just my own 100% subjective and inexplicable response to her work. Obviously she's a brilliant Pulitzer Prize winning author and I am a dunce. There's a lot that I appreciate about her writing, and she does all this stuff that in theory I should love. But even when I like it -- the castle portions of this book, the tweeted spy story "Black Box" -- her writing never affects me any more than decent TV. I just can't engage with it on a significant level. I don't really know why. It makes me sad, because on paper she should be my perfect match, but in that mysterious affairs-of-the-heart way, we lack chemistry. Sad! For me, not for Egan; she has plenty of suitors. Me, I'm back to pawing dismally through unread books on my shelves while I wait for Richard Powers's new book to come out, as it's scheduled to do in just eleven interminable and lonely days.

[Mattia Ravasi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video-review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jpa8...
Featured in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X6OQ...

Dope beyond words. An extraordinary Gothic novel that draws on its tradition to reflect upon the powers of the imagination, to stimulate the reader's, and to push the limits of first person narration TO THE MAX. Shares several similarities with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Oscar Wao is pretty much the best novel of all times.

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked this one up a month or so ago based on the NY Times Book Review writeup from forever ago, because was that review so positive that it glowed like a deep-sea anglerfish's esca? Oh, yes. But is that an apt metaphor? Also yes, because reading the book felt like being digested by an anglerfish (if you know what that feels like), plus guess what, and this is the most important take-away:

A book review in the NY Times Book Review is different from a book review in the NY Times; did everyone else know this but me?

For: Madison Smartt Bell in the NYTBR was bioluminescent in her praise, whereas Janet Maslin in her NYT br was more like "this book is the poor man's lobster" (her way of saying, "this is contrived and dumb and lame", I think. Who knows with Maslin?). (dropping this metaphor now; if you came here to read about anglerfish, please see my review of Anglerfish: The Secret History of the Fish that Saved Europe.)

There are some nice, likeable little things in the book, like the game "Terminal Zeus", although the best thing about it is the name, which sounds like something Neil Gaiman would say in his sleep, and not the description of the game, which seems put in there so there is a superficial connection between it and Dungeons & Dragons in general and folktale ghosts from "medieval times" and Danny's uncommented-upon-by-anyone-else-in-the-story goth makeup (which, huh?) and the titular haunted Keep. And in one of the superstructures (the initial haunted-stuff story of the cousins turns out to be written by an inmate in a prison writing workshop, and this story in turn may also be circumscribed by an überstory by the teacher, although I'd have to reread it to be sure, and guess what?), there is a box full of hair that a character uses to communicate with ghosts, and this might be the most intriguing single moment in the book, but ultimately just shows up, threatens to connect thematically and is then is disgarded in a Safran-Foer kind of way.

All the overall metaphors and all of the thematic connection between foils, in fact, feel superficial and tacked on with this book. Defenders will probably be quick to point out that this is reasonable, because the actual "authors" of the "stories" of the "book" are amateur writers who don't know what they're doing. I am no Madison Smartt Bell (and no Janet Maslin) (nor was meant to be -- foil joke!) and so I couldn’t say for sure that the awkwardness in the writing isn’t intentional, but I will say the poor writing is inconsistent -- good writing frequently shows up -- as are the poorly delineated characters: the inmate, Ray, gives his creation, Danny, a great deal of knowledge about things like the specific names of furniture from the 14th century that neither Danny nor Ray would know, but assuming they do, they then drop the ball on "crenellation" calling it "rectangle things". There's so much intertextual cross-polination and expositional buildup, that the final effect is like a Rube Goldberg contraption that ends up just turning on a lightbulb. (that was not a callback to the bioluminescent esca on an anglerfish stuff by the way. or was it? ooooh, I get to have it both ways!)
signed, Danny
signed, Ray
signed, Holly
signed, Jennifer

N.B. I just thought of a better way to say all of this, which is:
"House of Leaves hooked up with The Castle of Otranto and had a short baby."

[Lormac · Rating 1 out of 5]

Spoiler Alert!!! (But you may seriously want to consider whether you want to read this book.) I really liked "A Visit from the Goon Squad" so I was eager to read another novel by Egan, but something must have gone very wrong. Here is what I think happened: The author decided, ‘Let me write a book about a golden boy turned total loser who does something that makes him have to flee NYC (I won’t explain what he did because maybe the reader won’t care) and I will have him travel to a castle in some unnamed European country (the reader won’t care which country). It will turn out that his cousin, who he tried to drown for no good reason in a pool in an underground cave/tunnel when he was 12, bought this castle to turn it into a hotel for customers who want to get back in touch with their imaginations which they have lost touch with because they use cell phones. I will have a part of the castle already occupied by a 90+ year old crazy relative of the former owners (the reader won’t care why the cousin doesn’t just throw her out) and I will have the loser sleep with her because she used some sort of magic to get him to see her as young, and then next morning I will have him fall out the third story window of the castle tower. OK, by now he has been there 36 hours, so I better wrap things up. He will survive the fall, but suddenly become worried about the cousin and suspect that the cousin is trying to kill him (the readers won’t notice that the cousin hasn’t done a thing to deserve this suspicion except have the stupid idea of opening a hotel with no phones). So I will have him try to escape from the castle (the reader will forget that he has just been diagnosed with a concussion and told to avoid stress or he might die) but the closest village will be mysterious and have no buses, cars or trains. So I will have him buy a map of the castle showing that it has tunnels and go back. Then since 48 hours have passed at this point, I will have the cousin find the map and decide every single person in the castle (including the cousin’s 4 year old son and infant daughter) must immediately start to search through the tunnels. But – here is something the reader won’t see coming!! – they will get trapped in there and the cousin will freak out because of his childhood experience, and the loser will save the day, but then get shot and die.” So the author wrote this story and read it back to herself, and thought ‘Gee, this story sucks. How can I salvage it? I know! Let me wrap another story around it about the fact that this lousy story is being written by a convict in a prison’s creative writing course. That may explain why the story sucks so badly. To add some interest, I will have him get mortally stabbed for no good plot-based reason, and at the end I will reveal – wait for it – that the prisoner was the guy who shot the loser in the first story (I won’t have to explain how he ended up in an American prison after shooting the loser in the unnamed European country – the reader won’t care).’ So she wrote this second story, and read the whole thing and thought, “Gosh, it still sucks – maybe even worse now. I know! Let me add a epilogue where it turns out that the creative writing teacher is married to an aging rock star and is also a mother of two and a recovering meth addict who has fallen hopelessly in love with the prisoner. I will have her find out that the prisoner didn’t die but he escaped, and because she is so depressed about her horrible life, I will have her mother suggest that she take a vacation (!) so she will look on the internet and decided to travel to – wait for it – a castle hotel in some unnamed European country which doesn’t allow phones which is the same castle owned by the cousin! And I will make the hotel even more amazing by having no electricity in the rooms and the guests will all have to wear cashmere track suits and not make eye contact so they can get back in touch with their imaginations, and she will take a dip in the hotel pool where the loser died, and that is how I will end this!”

In other words, this is an awful book, which is really sad because I really enjoyed “A Visit From the Goon Squad.”

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is unusual. It is a modern gothic tale of imprisonment and escape, both physically and mentally. It is two stories that merge in an interesting way.

Story one is set in a dilapidated castle in the wilderness of Eastern Europe, complete with a keep and tunnels. It is an eerie setting with elements that border on the paranormal. Protagonist Danny has been invited to the castle by his cousin, Howie, who is renovating it to turn it into a hotel. The cousins were involved in an incident as children, where Danny abandoned Howie in an underground cave.

Story two involves prisoners taking a creative writing class. One of the prisoners, Ray, is writing a story. Writing serves as his mental escape. Teacher Holly has struggled with drug addiction, so she was in a prison of a different kind. Story two contains an ambiguity as to what is real versus what is imagined.

The characters must eventually confront their psychological traumas. There is an undercurrent of fear and anxiety. It can be confusing in places, and it is not for everyone, but I found it weirdly wonderful. I have previously read two other books by Egan, and this is my favorite of the three.

[Jessica Mae Stover]

The Keep is an argument in favor of dipping into living Pulitzer winners’ back catalogues. There are themes about imagination as a doorway to something else (Dungeons & Dragons, creative writing, an off-the-grid castle…) and themes of power (between cousins, between business associates, between cellmates…). Just as I was wondering if this one was for me, I hit the end of chapter one and the perspective tilted into metafiction, and my curiosity deepened. Egan wrote the novel during the years when the power of AOL/Aol was waning and YouTube et al waxing, which might be of interest to readers considering the role technology plays herein. She may have been ahead of the curve in including ideas about unplugging: the iPhone had not yet been released, nor had feeds engineered for doomscrolling.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is told (written) by an inmate in prison taking a writing class. The narrator (the inmate) isn't a great writer; he doesn't always know the "correct" word for things. (on the first page he refers to the top of castle having those "rectangle things that kids always put on the top of castles.") This "untalented" narrator allows for some of the best, coolest description of things and feelings I've ever read.

A very fast read. The end is disappointing, but only b/c so much of the book is greaking (yes, not freaking, greaking, I don't know what that means, but I used it) good.

Even not liking the ending all that much, this was easily one of my favorite reads.

[Jennifer Marie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here's another one of my "write the review as I go" commentaries. ** SPOILERS **

1- I would NEVER have chosen this book on my own, which means someone recommended it to me, but I can't for the life of me remember who.

2- I don't like the protagonist. I didn't from the start, and 1/4 into the book he's only just starting to have some redeeming qualities, but even so I just can't warm up to him.

3- The swearing. Too much, I just don't like swearing in books, and I know many would say this is middle, but for me I've heard plenty and I'm sure I'll be hearing more.

4- There is the most HILARIOUS scene on/about adverbs. If you're a writer you'd get it and laugh. Two characters are chatting about parts of English speak they can't stand and come to agree it's adverbs then go on to purposely use them. It's quite amusing.

5- Finally just figuring out WHAT this book is about. Took me only 100+ pages (SIGH)

6- Finally think I understand the parallel between the story and the "prison" story which seemed totally out of the blue and random and I couldn't figure out what was going on. (Maybe I was just slow on that point).

This story has the oddest effect on me. There are times when I'm completely caught up and other times where I'm bored and want the story to move on. I like the prison story more than the Keep story, yet I feel that the two are really one and the same and I don't want them to be. Mainly because the Prison Story is more interesting to me than the Keep story (which might actually be the opposite of what the author was going for...)

Ugh- I didn't like the end. And I really didn't like WHO it was that the story was actually about and who dies. Oh my, I almost liked it, till the very end...then I just completely lost interest.

[Alison · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't stop thinking about this book. Jennifer Egan is masterful at taking something (or sometimes a character) that's beautiful and forbidding and mysterious and slowly rendering it recognizably, imperfectly human. This book is particularly accomplished at just that. And the way she does it in two (actually three) parallel narratives reveals the shape of the over-arching metaphor in a particularly affecting way. I don't want to give anything away here, because the process of unfolding the mystery is as powerful as the mystery itself. But I'm a week out and I can't stop thinking about it.

[Ethan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Keep is a weird, imaginative, and different book. It's a story within a story. In the inner story, Danny is asked to go to an unnamed foreign country to help his long-lost cousin Howard, who recently purchased an old castle there and is renovating it to turn it into a hotel. The outer story follows a prison English teacher and some of her inmate students.

I didn't care much for the castle story, and found it to be dull and very thin plotwise. A lot of things are introduced in it that are never resolved, and it just felt like a filler story Egan needed to wrap to make the novel a story within a story, and not something she put much effort into. The prison story is much better, but the fact remains that about half of this book is taken up by the castle story, so that drags my rating for the book down a bit.

Near the end Egan brilliantly ties the two stories together, and there were times where this was a four-star book in the final third. But Egan really fumbles the ending, and the last ten pages were a slog to get through. It was also an open kind of ending that didn't provide satisfactory closure to the story, and given the setup she was building to just before the final ten pages, the ending could have been so much better. A huge missed opportunity, in my opinion.

Overall, this wasn't bad. Egan is clearly a gifted, imaginative writer, but as a whole this one was just a "decent" read for me. I do look forward to reading more of Egan's work in the future though.

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This book blew me away on so many levels (although it’s a tricky one to review without spoilers). Egan is a master of her craft – she creates vivid, lively characters and puts them into strange and intense situations, which kept me on the edge of my seat. Deadbeat New Yorker Danny finds himself down on luck and escapes to his cousin Howard’s castle in Eastern Europe, which is being renovated into a tech-free resort in the 1990s. But Danny and Howie have unfinished business from childhood, which starts to bleed into the present in unexpected ways. Meanwhile, the castle’s own history is eerily dredged up, causing Danny to question his decision to come.

The book is beautifully structured, but again, I can’t say too much more without spoiling it! What I can say is that the different narrative threads are very cleverly combined, and I felt the ending was pitched perfectly for the tone of the story.

This is absolutely a Gothic novel, but with a contemporary spin (e.g. Danny has anxiety about being disconnected from phones at the castle). Egan manages to keep the story moving while maintaining escalating tension – I flew through the story, a testament to both her writing and clever plot pacing.

I had the great privilege of hearing Egan speak at Sydney Writers’ Festival, and I’m super keen to read more of her work after loving both this and A Visit From the Goon Squad. Do you ever delve into a favourite author’s back catalogue? Have you found any unexpected gems?

Recommended if you liked: Le Chateau

[Genevieve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up Jennifer Egan's The Keep because, well, Halloween, and for its premise: three different stories told by three different narrators that intertwine for an unusual twist on the gothic tale. The Keep opens with a seemingly traditional gothic tale. Danny arrives at the doorstep of a castle somewhere in central Europe after a maddeningly long and confusing journey. He's tired and disoriented and before him, in all its glory, is a mysterious castle, heavy with atmosphere and history, something out of a fevered dream. Danny has a history of his own too, as it seems all protagonists do in gothic tales. He's an ex-con who bounced around a bit, and has recently gotten into the kind of trouble that involves busted kneecaps (he walks with a limp when we first meet him). When his cousin Howard calls him out of the blue and invites him to help with a castle renovation, dangling a one-way ticket, Danny is quickly on board. Serendipity or so it seems.

Now cue the organ music to highlight that something is amiss.

We learn that the relationship between Danny and Howard isn't so straightforward. A horrible childhood incident (recounted in flashback) has marred their lives forever, and you begin to suspect that Howard's motives might be more sinister. As the days go by, Danny's perceptions of the castle begin to darken. Egan gets a little heavy-handed with the foreshadowing when Howard reveals his renovation plans for the castle: to turn it into a new-age retreat for people to get in touch with their inner imaginations. Howard argues that TV and movies and other forms of passive entertainment have impoverished the mind, that we don't know how to tell ourselves stories anymore. Danny balks at this and then starts to become increasingly paranoid about his cousin's true intentions. Perhaps his cousin has brought him here to enact some revenge fantasy on him as payback for that long-ago but never forgotten, cruel childhood prank. Egan's brilliant, slow poison starts to take effect, and we see Danny start to unravel.

The fourth wall breaks early on with this line, so watch for it: "You? Who the hell are you?  That’s what someone must be saying right about now.  Well, I’m the guy talking.  Someone’s always doing the talking, just a lot of times you don’t know who it is or what their reasons are.  My teacher, Holly, told me that." The line comes like a slap right in the middle of Danny's narrative. The trespassing authorial presence seems to engage us directly, and suddenly the gothic creepiness dissolves into something more ominous. Who is telling this story?

Cue the second story. We find out that the first story is an account being written by another character, Ray. Ray is a convict in a max security prison doing time for murder. He's writing about Danny and Howard as part of a creative writing course. He claims the story is true, told to him by a friend, and yet it's obvious that Ray is more involved in the story's events than he's letting on. In this narrative, Egan mostly shows Ray growing more and more infatuated with this writing teacher, Holly.

In the third story, Holly becomes our narrator, and we learn how she's become emotionally involved with Ray and how the castle story about Danny and Howard connects them somehow. The connection is more emotional and psychological at first, and later becomes something much more real. Or so it seems.

I can't make up my mind about The Keep. On one hand, it's a mind-bending Mobius strip of a book; on the other, it feels gimmicky, and besides, other writers have done it and done it better. But I suspect there's something there meant to fool us, to make us dismiss it too quickly. (To show our flawed, impoverished imaginations perhaps?) On the whole, the book is a story about childhood demons that never quite go away, psychological traumas that come back and become real-world dangers. To her credit, Egan creates some genuinely horrifying moments. The scenes of Danny walking around the castle grounds; the dark pool of sludge he ponders; the keep with its strange occupant, a malevolent baroness who refuses to vacate the castle; the small town whose streets become a maze that Danny can't navigate; the claustrophobia-inducing underground tunnels—all nightmarish. But the way the book is structured—with its second story intruding early on—Egan robs the book of some of the psychological complexity it could be building up, and we never truly have the gothic aspects to ourselves. We're always made aware that it's *just* a story.

Though I now wonder...could this all be some kind of larger authorial trick? I started to suspect this by the time I got to the Holly story. OK, I thought, here's a book that has three strands woven together in a tight braid. There are twists and turns that are clever, though mostly obvious, and then Egan drops the narrative magic altogether by the time we get to Holly's story. At this point, I was feeling cheated, like the complex layers of narrative had all been too contrived and forced.

As I started thinking more about Holly, though, I began to develop other ideas. Egan is being very, very deliberate with Holly. Holly's narrative is supposed to be the 'real' part of the story, where all illusions drop away, where the veil is finally lifted. But I suspect that Egan is actually showing us the real 'gothic' story with Holly. In the last few pages, Holly decides to drop everything and visit the castle from Ray's story. She gets on a plane and make the journey, exactly as Danny does in the first story. I couldn't help but think she was entering her own fever dream. In fact, she desperately and irrationally hopes that Ray might be there so they can reunite. In one section, Holly even assumes the character of the baroness locked away in the keep. The book finally ends with a surreal scene with Holly stepping into the pool of imagination.

The Keep is much more complex for its own good, much like the castle, and maybe even our imaginations, with all its impenetrable walls, unfathomable depths, and dark passageways.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading (and loving) Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad almost two years ago, I purposefully didn't pick up anything else she wrote for a while. I didn't want to run the risk that the author of one of my all-time favorite books was a flash in the pan, a one-trick pony. Turns out I needn't have worried. The Keep is a rich, perplexing, wonderful book, and the less you know about it going in, the better.

At first it appears to be about childhood resentments bubbling to the surface in adulthood as Danny, a ne'er-do-well with a spotty employment record and checkered past, is invited to help his cousin Howard renovate a European castle and turn it into a hotel. There's tension and trauma between these two, and for a while you're expecting Egan to explore how the sins of the past return to haunt us in the present. But then she turns the narration on its head, and what you thought the book was about isn't what it's about at all. So you settle into this new paradigm and marvel at how Egan's pulling this off ... and then she does it again in the final pages, another shift in narration, another adjustment of the reader's expectations.

I'm being purposefully vague, because I think if I knew what was coming it wouldn't have been nearly as effective or delightful. The whole thing manages to be a lament for childhood, a gothic horror story, and an exploration of the American penal system. It's a dynamite book, and I won't be waiting two more years to spend some time with Egan.

[Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't immediately take to this, primarily because I instantly disliked both the protagonist and the narrator, but I stuck with it because the book is so short - more of a novella than a novel, really. It's diverting enough, but the supernatural element of the story - which for me is by far the most captivating part - is relegated in favour of the less interesting battle of wits between Danny and Howard, and the narrator's own tale. The book could have been something to really get your teeth into if it had been twice its actual length; as it is, the ghostly twists (in particular the baroness's mysterious powers) feel underdeveloped and somewhat incongruous.

[Kasia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was such an enigma to me and only half way thought was when I started appreciating the delectable balance of realms changing from sanity to the reality that the author wanted me to appreciate. The Keep is unlike any other book I've read in the past year, it has more than one narrator, three to be exact, and all different people who become the strands of the rope binding the story. This tale reads like a surreal fairy tale switching between Danny who has lost his home, job and stability with nothing else to do but go live with his cousin Howard at a castle somewhere near Prague and Ray who is an inmate at a prison completing a writing class only to get close to his teacher Holly, who he feels is the only person who understands him and who matters.

The tale switches from Danny and his frustration of not having any internet and cell phone connection to which he is addicted to beyond belief, quite ironic since he arrives as a crumbling castle with interns trying to renovate it, his cousin and his wife Annie who shun out all electronic equipment in order to keep the place as a sanctuary type of a hotel,his best friend and a crazy baroness who is the last surviving living member who's life line carries the history and secrets of the castle itself. The story is quite interesting where the cousins start to remember their troubled past and compare their present situation as it switches back and forth form them and unveiling the baroness and the castle's secrets to them and Ray, the talented prison writer who is making up a story that might not be so fictional after all, one that will make for an amazing ending of a great novel.

I found the writing to be haunting and very real. The author does an amazing job of digging deep into the human subconscious and psyche and churns out lines that the characters say and deal with that I found touched how I was feeling at the time when I read the book. She describes Danny and his guilty subconscious thoughts of being worried about something that all the worrying in the world won't change as a worm that is digging deeper and deeper into his brain. If he decides to let it in and eat him alive, his thought to control his emotions as he has a very close encounter with death then he is doomed. I found the writing to be fascinating and by the end of the book anything was possible. I loved the story and I am quite impressed that such a short book held my attention as such high interest the whole time I was reading it. This is for the open minded, about borders, tales and sanity levels that overlap to form a fantastic story that marries old civilizations and modern day marvels into one fun tale of enigmatic proportions that was better than I could have even suspected. This book is hard to explain, it must simply be read and digested by each reader to be fully appreciated.


- Kasia S.

[Sonya · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've had this ebook since 2010. I think I tried to read it a couple of times but it seemed too convoluted and I put it aside. But in a recent By the Book, Rebecca Makkai answered the question What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of by saying: "It’s not that unknown, but everyone’s out here loving Jennifer Egan and somehow not reading 'The Keep,' her best and weirdest novel. She gets away with things no one has any right to get away with; that’s my favorite kind of book." And then a bunch of writers I like on Twitter talked about that response and raved about The Keep and I had a severe moment of Fear of Missing Out and so I saw that I owned the book already and I had no excuse not to try it again. And I wasn't disappointed.

The pleasure of this short novel is the writing and the puzzles the story is presenting. The writing itself is lively and full of the energy of its characters as they strive and obsess and get into their own heads. And it all comes to a head near the end. So satisfying. I liked my time in this larger-than-life story nested in a story nested in a tragedy. The key to finishing is to release all expectations and word-sleuthing and just Let The Story Happen To You.

[cyrus · Rating 5 out of 5]

A subversive twist on gothic tropes that twists the very idea of subversion with its structural and conceptual peculiarities. Echoes of The Turn of the Screw; made me think more about the nature of stories about others' stories. This all wouldn't work if Egan wasn't confident and capable in her execution of different narrative voices and messy psychology. The characters are prone to panic and delusion that can't save them from their suffocating helplessness. This world's logic is spiky and nasty, with something desperate always bubbling underneath.

The exploration of emotional/spiritual dependence on technology, in the specific context of the early 00s, left me with a lot to chew on. The ending is divisive but ultimately I found that it offered emotional and thematic closure, even if it wasn't on the subjects that initially seemed most important.

2024: Read it again just to be sure the headspace of my final semester of undergrad wasn't making me imagine things. Yeah this book is still perfect.

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

omg i read this in three hours and fifteen minutes and could not put it down and i am pretty sure it has restored my joy of reading and it's such a FUN and READABLE and ENGAGING book, why is jennifer egan SO good at pulling the reader in?? honestly how. look: is this a perfect book, no. is it a great roiling ride through guilt, what it means to be connected, how deus ex machina can blow up in your face? absolutely. is it also a perfect plane book, especially when flying back from 24 imaginary hours in belgrade? yes. and howard would love that the trip was real.

[Luca Masera · Rating 3 out of 5]

Che fatica arrivare in fondo… 300 pagine che mi sono sembrate 900 per un romanzo meta-letterario in cui il racconto gotico (?) scritto da un carcerato che partecipa a un corso di scrittura creativa diventa parte di un romanzo ben più ampio. Due storie quindi che vanno avanti in parallelo rimandosi vicendevolmente per temi e situazioni.

La scrittura della Egan è tanto meravigliosa quanto cruda quando si tratta della storia “vera”, una storia che parla di droga e carcere, mentre incespica (probabilmente in modo voluto) nella parte del racconto ambientata in un fantomatico castello in Germania dove sogno e realtà continuano a prendere il posto l’uno dell’altra. Sul piatto della bilancia, a mio avviso, la seconda parte incide molto sulla prima, purtroppo in modo negativo.

3 stelline meno meno meno

[Ms.pegasus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The suggestion of familiarity – deja vu – is all author Jennifer Egan needs to animate this contemporary novel with gothic vibes. Without that human connection, the obligatory set pieces of moldering castle, remote eastern European woodland and demented baroness would feel like the trappings of a carnival fun house. The castle has been purchased by Howie, Danny's estranged cousin. Howie hopes to renovate it. Danny approaches: “He'd never been to a castle before or even this part of the world, but something about it all was familiar to Danny. He seemed to remember the place from a long time ago, not like he'd been here exactly but from a dream or a book.” (p.3). Toward the climactic ending, a different character expresses similar feelings: “A big iron gate, two towers, a slide door leading inside. All of it so familiar it's like I'm coming back for the second time.” (p.234)

Two stories intertwine here. We wonder who Danny is, really. Why has Howie invited him after all these years? Egan glides back and forth seamlessly between this dark gothic gloom and the prison where Ray is incarcerated. To sever the monotony and gain some relief from his cellmate Davis, Ray has enrolled in a creative writing class. Their teacher is enigmatic. She has taken great pains to create an opaque personality, one that Ray is drawn to by both curiosity and a sense of the painful secrets she is hiding.

How does Egan prevent a loss of tension between the two stories? The intensity of her characters captures our emotions. There is a thin line between passion and obsession, and Howard seems to have crossed it. His top assistant, Mick, is a brooding presence at times both a devotee and an enabler. At the prison Ray is constantly on high alert. Every prisoner is a hair's breadth away from psychotic meltdown.

The imagery shape-shifts through different contexts. Danny, like Ray, is highly attuned to the social pecking order. His wariness, combined with the uncertainties of his role spill into paranoia. Ray's wariness flows in the opposite direction, an obsession to connect with the persona Holly is concealing. Mick's arm is scarred with needle track marks; Tom-Tom, another inmate in the class, is described as a “meth freak”. (p.53) Davis, Ray's cellmate, “invents” a radio. It's really a painted shoebox which he contends with infectious conviction captures the voices of the dead: “All that love, all that pain, all the stuff people feel – not just me and you, brother, but everyone, everyone who's ever walked this beautiful green planet – how can all that disappear when somebody dies? It can't disappear, it's too big. Too strong, too ...permanent. So it moves to another frequency, where the human ear can't pick it up. (p.97-98) For us, he echoes the baroness in Danny's story, who declares she is the sum of generations of ancestors, all of whom live inside of her, literally.

Egan transfigures the idea of twins. The castle's tragic history recounts the drowning of two children. The intertwined bodies of the twins were discovered when the murky waters of a large pool were finally drained. Davis shares his “radio” after reading the hidden pages of Ray's creative writing manuscript. Impressed with Ray's breach of the boundary between the real and the imaginative, he declares they are like twins. Egan briefly merges the two stories in a startling conversation between Danny and Ray: “'Where the fuck did you come from?'....'We're twins. There's no separating us.'....And then he started to talk, whispering in my ear. Underneath me, Davis lay on his tray with the orange radio pushed up against his head. His eyes were shut. He turned the knobs, listening.” (p.209)

Bit by bit, Egan dissolves reality's boundaries. Blurred figures seen through Ray's prison window clarify. The illusion of the baroness as a young girl changes: “With every step Danny took, the lady aged – her blond hair whitened out, her skin kind of liquified and the dress paunched and drooped like a time-lapse picture of a flower dying.” (p.79)

The novel teases us. We become obsessed with the relationship between Ray the author, and the story he is writing. He claims its just a story someone told him, but the details and psychological intensity suggest this is in some way autobiographical.

Egan's novel juxtaposes the 24/7 connectivity technology has given us with an insurmountable anomie. Through her characters she presents technology as a binary straight-jacket offering only a menu of choices like a series of on/off switches. It's a simple thesis argued in a compelling and creative intertwining of stories.

[Vincenzo Politi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cosa posso dire di questa scrittrice americana che, zitta zitta, è riuscita a conquistarmi?

Quello che mi colpisce, di Jennifer Egan, è la sua capacità di produrre romanzi dalla struttura poco consueta, volendo anche 'sperimentali' (checché significhi questa parola, specie in un periodo in cui oramai si è sperimentato tutto lo sperimentabile, e spesso pure a sproposito), ma mantenendo una grande scorrevolezza, leggibilità e senso dell'intrattenimento. Insomma, la grande Letteratura (quella con la L maiuscola, che si studia all'università) che incontra i best seller, la gravità della ricerca letteraria a braccetto con la leggerezza del gusto di narrate.

Per esempio, senza fare troppi spoiler, La Fortezza è un romanzo gotico dentro un romanzo autobiografico dentro un racconto. Leggere per credere. Ok, la parte 'gotica' presenta alcune debolezze, il ritmo avrebbe potuto essere più serrato in alcune parti, ma il vero punto di forza della Egan è la costruzione dei personaggi. Ognuno è tridimensionale, ognuno è credibile, ognuno ha una sua voce. Si fa quasi fatica a credere che tutti questi personaggi siano stati concepiti dalla stessa mente, siano usciti dalla stessa penna. Jennifer Egan costruisce personaggi maschili e femminili che sembrano uomini e donne vere, non pupazzi prigionieri di una trama. Come ci riesce, lo sa solo lei. Oppure, è uno dei tanti misteri e delle tante magie della sua fortezza...

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very peculiar book, about two cousins who re-unite at an old castle in Germany after not having seen each other since childhood. Along with this, it's the story of an inmate in prison for shooting someone in the head. At first, the transitions seemed a little jarring, as well as the narration, but I found it pretty easy to get the swing of.

A lot of readers seemed put off by the vague narration style, and how at times you don't really know what happened or if things were just a dream. I'm a fan of more surrealist works, like Haruki Murakami, so I actually really liked this aspect of the book. It's one of those books that whether it happened or not doesn't really matter--what matters is the actions characters take because of what they thought happened.

I wasn't exactly sure how she planned on tying the two stories together, but in the end I really liked the result. Not a book for the more literal-minded crowd, but worth a shot if you can tolerate disjointed narration styles.

[aPriL does feral sometimes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this! Gothic, meta, ghosts, weird, disturbing, what's not to like? Unfortunately, either I was too stupid or Egan didn't tie enough loose ends together to finish her meta-fiction, and literary thoughts. I gave it four stars because of the journey of the story and the delightful atmospherics (man, this book can CREEP you out!) but it ends either too soon, or chapters should have been added to end certain plots within plots within plots (too open-ended). However, WHAT a puzzle-box of a start and middle! I think this would be an EXCELLENT book for writer folks to bounce off of! This is such a playful book, it has caused me to completely reassess the only other book of Egan's that I read. If she is in reality such a playful, cynical but loving, meta-fictional writer, I like her much better. But damn! Why didn't she cook this book a little more thoroughly?

[Colby · Rating 5 out of 5]

a brilliantly structured, imaginative, and arresting modern gothic that throws you into an eerie, encroaching sense of dread that only gets louder as the truth unfurls. the keep is infuriating in the sense that i want to shove it at everyone i know, but all i can say to bring you to it is to trust me and to dive in knowing nothing about it. it’s the first jennifer egan book that ever caught my attention and i’ve every intention of driving through the rest of her work now.

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

A post-modern Gothic masterpiece. Very enjoyable, constantly surprising, and unexpectedly moving in the end.

[Sacha · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Keep by Jennifer Egan

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (5*)

This was a strange book. Not in a bad way, but certainly not an average story. I found it surprisingly difficult to write this review, mainly because I do not want to spoil anything. Since it was a good thing for me to go into the story totally blind. The novel starts as one kind of story and ends as something completely different. I have never read a book before that changes its genre so clearly in the middle, but it turned out to be an amazing ride.

„New Yorker Danny is running from something. A loner who cannot bear to be apart from his Wi-Fi connection, he is in need of refuge. His cousin Howie is an enigmatic and successful former drug addict who just happens to own a castle. As they turn the castle from crumbling ruin to luxury hotel, Howie and Danny must navigate their uncomfortable relationship. And the castle has some surprises of its own: a sinister baroness, a tragic accident in a fathomless pool, a treacherous labyrinth, and through all of this, a story within a story.“

I liked Danny and Ray, and I also liked Holly. I have read many reviews and articles about the book and especially about the ending, pointing out various flaws. Some of those did not bother me at all, and some of them were, in my opinion, simply not correct.

The biggest issue for me was the use of names in front of some of the direct speech parts, like:

Danny: „Hello!“

I suspect this bothered me more because I listened to the audiobook, but after a few pages I was able to ignore it.

As the story went on, I became extremely hooked. And I mean that quite literally. Even with the best Stephen King novel or any other great book, there usually comes a point where I need to stop reading or listening because I have had „enough“ for the moment. Here, that never happened. I constantly wanted to know what was going on. At times the story became so strange that I could not even guess where it was heading, and that uncertainty kept me reading.

The writing felt good and comfortable, never too flowery or overly poetic. Sometimes it was not entirely clear to me what was real and what was a dream or a thought, but that ambiguity only made the book better for me. I really liked the big twist after about 70% of the story, and I also liked the ending very much.

I rooted for Holly, Danny, and Ray, and I genuinely cared about them, even though the book is quite short. In the end, this was a clear five star read for me.

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