![]() ![]() Egan’s last novel-the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)-took those same concerns and, with a formal ingenuity that mirrored our fractured national conversation, explored her central theme: the lengths that people unhappy with their station in life will go to improve or escape it. What makes Look at Me resonate today is its thoughtful consideration of struggles that have come to define our Internet age: interconnectivity vs. Each one of these folks will have their own home page-we call it a PersonalSpace™-devoted exclusively to their lives, internal and external.” The fact that MySpace went online two years later only proves how far ahead of the curve Egan’s art was to the actual. ![]() “What I’m doing,” says the businessman, “is I’m optioning the rights to people’s stories, just ordinary Americans. Consider the ambitious tech entrepreneur, sitting in a Manhattan restaurant “where the air smelled of arugula and money,” as he pitches a startup called Extra/-a platform that offers a window into the lives of “ordinary people” for a subscription fee, and their “extraordinary” counterparts (models, celebrities) for an additional premium. Jennifer Egan’s 2001 novel, Look at Me, described New York’s crowded loneliness by contrasting an image-obsessed Manhattan model with the willful insularity of seemingly normal people in Rockford, Illinois, and ended up predicting the next decade’s social media landscape with alarming clarity. ![]()
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