‘The Keep,’ by Jennifer Egan - The New York Times Book Review - New York Times:
Danny has plenty of doors in his head. Preternaturally adapted to the 21st-century psychological space created by cellphones and the Internet, he is, one might say, an information addict. He has a physical sixth sense for the presence of wireless networks and fills his luggage with gizmos to keep himself plugged into cyberspace. At the same time he is acutely paranoid, since the exhilaration of being constantly connected can so easily flip into the horror of being constantly invaded. an interesting observation-insight -- makes sense -- true in practice? probably. but I don't remember witnessing it this character. hmm. okay. thinks Howard may be setting up the situation to 'mess with his head.' but this doesn't seem to be an aspect of the connectedness he seeks out ---- which is connectedness from one place to another. being in both. Howard has got him too much in this one place.
Danny is also obsessed by power, and knows that information is a form of it. Very sensitive to the power flowing all around him yes, and to the power relationships among all the people in his sphere, he’s seldom able to profit from his awareness well- he's been second to powerful men more than once - it's just not led anywhere. The ancient baroness who has shut herself up in the castle’s keep fascinates him partly because “she was powerless any way you sliced it, but she thought she was strong and that made it true in a way.” Moreover, the baroness is wired in her own special way, to the 80 generations of her ancestors nice -although~does the comparison (of-kind-of-connection) hold up to in the metaphor of this wor-'wired'?: “Now their bodies are dust — they’re part of the soil and the trees and even the air we’re breathing this very minute, and I am all of those people. . . . There is no separation between us.” again - wiredness is connection from one place to another, there is a separation ~ simult with the connection. A trapdoor hm in the novel’s structure connects this moment to another in the modern prison, where Ray’s cellmate unveils a box full of hair he uses to hear the voices of the dead.
“The Keep” does have two interesting antecedents. One is Ted Mooney’s “Easy Travel to Other Planets,” and the other is “The Magus,” by John Fowles, whose textual manipulations always seemed much more like real magic than the merely technical prestidigitation of his contemporaries. “The Magus,” like “The Keep,” presents a shimmering, marvelous world whose infinite self-reflection tends to collapse into an all-devouring paranoia — what Danny calls “the worm.” The big difference is that Egan is somehow able to bring her story and characters out on the other side of the paranoid abyss.