Salon.com > Jennifer Egan

Whispering sweet post-structuralist nothings

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 21:00:00 +0000

My favorite love song of the past few years is “Video Games,” by Lana Del Ray because of the third line of the chorus. It's the song's most burlesque moment, a come-on that should feel scuzzy and hackneyed, that should ruin everything: “I heard that you like the bad girls, honey.” But it catapults the song over all the barricades I’ve erected in my soul against love songs and against songs in which the singer self-identifies as “bad.” The reason is that the melody in which this particular line is sung cuts against its meaning. Because the words are about sex, you’d expect the song’s heretofore sultry melody to remain sultry or wax sultrier. Instead, on the words “bad girls, honey,” the vocal goes high, chaste, folky. If you only heard this snippet of melody, without words or context, you’d guess it belonged in an Indigo Girls song about ghosts or injustice, or in a lament about Scotland. That’s why the “bad girls, honey” kills me: The words are able to register as hot because the notes are cold. The operative principle here — you can get away with saying something very warm if you deliver it in a cold medium — also explains why Lana Del Ray gave this warmest of torch songs the coldest of names.

Jennifer Egan: “Goon Squad” could have been better!

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 16:00:00 +0000

When I’m not writing I feel an awareness that something’s missing. If I go a long time, it becomes worse. I become depressed. There’s something vital that’s not happening. A certain slow damage starts to occur. I can coast along awhile without it, but then my limbs go numb. Something bad is happening to me, and I know it. The longer I wait, the harder it is to start again.

When I’m writing, especially if it’s going well, I’m living in two different dimensions: this life I’m living now, which I enjoy very much, and this completely other world I’m inhabiting that no one else knows about. I don’t think my husband can tell. It’s a double life I get to live without destroying my marriage. And it’s heaven.

Especially when I’m writing a first draft, I feel as if I’ve been transported out of myself. That’s always a state I’m trying to achieve, even as a journalist — although when I’m working on nonfiction I’m almost never actually writing. I do months of research and then write the piece in a few days.

It’s good to be pretentious!

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, for the first time in many years, I watched Richard Linklater’s 1994 film "Before Sunrise." I remembered it well, down to particular lines of dialogue and the movements of background players that might go unnoticed by a viewer less obsessive than myself. Back in the late '90s, the tape of my VHS copy of the movie stretched and strained between the heads of the VCR, weakening after so many rewinds and repeated viewings. The story of the film is simple enough: Girl and boy, Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke), meet on a train in Europe. She is going home to Paris; he is stopping in Vienna and catching a plane back to the States in the morning. They talk. They connect. Before they’ve even exchanged names he convinces her to hang out with him for the night. She agrees and they do just that: hang out. Like Linklater’s first two films ("Slacker" and "Dazed and Confused"), "Before Sunrise" is charmingly plotless, following the two characters as they walk and talk through the evening and night, falling in love.

TV and the novel: A match made in heaven

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 22:00:00 +0000

The news last week that HBO had optioned the works of William Faulkner for adaptation by "Deadwood" creator David Milch was treated in some press reports as incongruous. It shouldn't have been. The mindless take on "Deadwood" is that it had a lot of swearing in it (which it did, but so what? -- get over it, for cryin' out loud!), yet viewers not mesmerized by the four-letter words noticed the Shakespearean and King Jamesian cadences of Milch's dialogue from the start. Those influences are evident in Faulkner's fiction, as well. (Also, let's not forget we're talking about a man who wrote a novel in which a woman is raped with a corncob -- this isn't Merchant-Ivory territory.) Milch and Faulkner is, in fact, an inspired pairing.

The Faulkner acquisition is only the latest prize in a literary shopping spree for HBO and other television companies. The premium cable network is currently at work on adaptations of Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections," Jennifer Egan's "A Visit From the Goon Squad, and Neil Gaiman's "American Gods," in addition to its ongoing series based on the novels of George R.R. Martin ("Game of Thrones") and Charlaine Harris ("True Blood"). Fox will be turning Lev Grossman's "The Magicians" into an hour-long dramatic series, as well, and Salman Rushdie is at work on an original show, "Next People," for Showtime. The novel and television are commingling as never before. And it's about time.