One Writer, Two Voices

THE KEEP

By Jennifer Egan

Knopf. 240 pp. $23.95

Ray Dobbs is a prison inmate who feels so trapped that he can measure his days in steps. In jail for murder, he's a loner who spends most of his time watching the "murky gray shapes" moving past his small, opaque cell window. One day, Ray decides to take a writing class, ostensibly to avoid his strange and scheming cellmate. But his teacher, Holly, tells him that writing isn't just something to pass the time; it might be a means of escape. "My job is to show you a door you can open," Holly says. It's hard to imagine a canny, brooding smart aleck like Ray falling for such a line, but he does. Besides, he has a story to tell. And that story forms the bulk of Jennifer Egan's new novel, "The Keep."

Ray's novel-within-this-novel begins with a character, Danny, searching unsuccessfully for a door. Danny's been invited by his wealthy cousin Howard to turn a crumbling Old World castle into a hotel, but when he arrives, he can't find the gate. Things have not been going well for Danny, a 36-year-old New York transplant: The scars on his body (a cigarette burn, a lump on his head made by a loan shark with a set of keys, a torn earlobe and so forth) map a topography of ill fortune and bad decisions.

It hasn't always been this way. For the first 18 years of his life, Danny was "suchagoodboy," a good-looking soccer star with a girlfriend on the pom squad. Then he arrived in New York for college, threw away the polo shirts, pulled on a pair of hipster leather boots bought on lower Broadway and envisioned a new "wild, mysterious" life driven by the "secret pulse" of dance music. Instead, what he got was a series of failed business ventures, uncaring friends and loveless relationships. Now Danny's adrift -- not a bad guy, but definitely a loser.

As a young teenager, Danny did a horrible thing, and he's been haunted by it: He and an older, cooler cousin took their little cousin Howie into a cave and left him there to die. Howie -- already an outsider, a fat kid too well versed in the rules of Dungeons & Dragons -- emerged, but not unscathed: He began using drugs, tried to rob a 7-Eleven and was sent to reform school. Now, though, Howie has become Howard: tan, wealthy and cheerful. But he has cracks in his perfect veneer, created by marital tensions and a domineering leadership style. Neither man is a villain, neither a saint.

What explains their crossing fortunes? Howard claims that he was saved by his imagination -- that impregnable fortress inside him where he could confront and control his fears by transforming them into harmless spectacles. In the imagination, a man might find life to be haunted, even maddening, but he might also find himself and something worth living for in a soulless, mechanical world. "Let people be tourists of their own imaginations," he crows. Danny is suspicious -- he's spent his whole life avoiding his own thoughts, to the point that he's lugged a satellite dish to Germany to ensure uninterrupted Internet and phone service. But when the dish breaks, in this strange land and without a lifeline to the outside world, Danny finds that he has no choice but to confront his insecurities and demons. Brushes with death teach familiar lessons: Appearances deceive, love is worth protecting and maybe, just maybe, redemption through the imagination is possible.

Egan's premise -- using a convicted murderer to tell a story about rehabilitation and the shifting fortunes of aggressors and victims -- is bold. The problem is that Ray can't quite carry it off. In her previous novel, "Look at Me," Egan juggled plotlines and characters with a sharp voice and dazzling writing. Here, though, she has chosen the guise of an untrained writer, and it's a little too convincing. Ray's "The Keep" is a haphazard string of tired, Gothic tropes and clumsy authorial asides ("There was no pause in Howard's talking, but I'm taking a pause here to tell you that Danny wasn't listening") leavened with a few instances of original language (the "smoky bite" of fall air; a powerful presence "like a towel snapping near his face").

The plot, too, is fairly predictable (a quickening of the imagination; a chance for Danny to redeem himself; the requisite climactic twist), though there are some funny and inventive moments along the way, notably a wild tryst between Danny and the ancient Baroness von Ausblinker, whose family owned the castle for nine centuries and who's locked herself in the keep to foil Howard's construction efforts. Still, what could be a startling exercise in empathy stumbles in the contrivance of using the writing style of Ray, an inexperienced, mediocre author.

At the end of the book, Ray tells Holly that "that stuff" he wrote is no good. She protests, saying that it's simply raw and unformed. Holly's right; it's not terrible. But Ray Dobbs is certainly no Jennifer Egan.