The Keep, by Jennifer Egan

This 2006 novel has multiple narratives – Parts 1 and 2, most of the book, work. But Part 3, the last 30 pages, deus ex machina*, broke it for me. I didn’t believe it, and the fact that Egan included it soured me on the whole tale. That’s too bad, because Parts 1 and 2 had me convinced. 

Without giving away too much, we have Danny who did something terrible to his cousin when they were kids. But now Howard is successful, made so much money that he’s bought a European castle with the intention of turning it into an introspection lens for people trapped in the grip of a reality that’s deadened them. Howard invites Danny to join the renovation team that will turn this crusty ancient place into the hotel of his dreams. Danny comes because he’s between gigs and failing in his life, and he’s curious how Howard survived his trauma. 

The Keep of the title is a tower still inhabited by an ancient Baroness who can’t stop Howard from buying the rest of the place, but will not relinquish her grip on its history, its lineage of which she is part and these interlopers are not. A parallel narrative accompanies Danny’s – a prisoner’s. Then, after we've come so far, a third narrator runs it off the rails. 

Meanwhile, Egan offers some truly creative ideas: an inmate’s prized possession is a shoebox full of odds and ends but mostly dust. Knobs pushed into the side like radio dials, tune in ghosts. I loved the dust radio – the inmate’s logic is unassailable: “But think about it, brother: new technology always looks like magic. When Tom Edison turned on that tin phonograph of his back in 1877, you think people believed that was for real? Hell no. Ventriloquism, they said. Voodoo. They thought no machine could do such a thing.” 

She also invents some apt words: “Danny was himself again, which meant not just knowing things but knowing more things than other people, seeing all the links when everybody else could see only a few. Information… [T]here was a power in just having it, in knowing where everyone stood. And Danny had a word that could say all that. One word: alto.” And she gives us another word: Worm. The eviscerating fear that devours you from the inside, that once it has you, never lets go. 

*“Deus ex machina” is Latin, meaning “God out of the machine” – stage machinery in Greek and Roman drama brought in a god to set everything right. It’s unearned resolution, inherently unsatisfactory. The writer boxed herself in, so she resorted to an extraneous element to tie up the loose ends.