'The Keep' by Jennifer Egan

The Keep, Jennifer Egan (3.5)

I’ve read two of Jennifer Egan’s books (‘A Visit from the Goon Squad’ and ‘The Keep’) and they were very different from one another.  The one similarity I found was that all the characters have a relatively major flaw.  It tends to keep them more real and believable which makes the atypical drama that much more surprising.  I liked ‘The Keep’ more, as it has interesting twists and turns.  A book that can keep me churning to figure out where the plot is going, and allows me to puzzle it out (albeit 5 minutes after finishing the last page!) has a definite satisfactory feel.  ‘The Keep’ tells two stories:  one of a man going to help his cousin, Howard, renovate a castle near Prague, and the other of a man in prison taking a writing class.  The cousins share a dark event in their past and you are continually trying to understand why Howard invited his cousin and to what end.  Egan’s writing is dark and mysterious, like the castle and Transylvanian-like locale, which fills your mind with many possible evil outcomes.  Usually I end up being disappointed in the actual, but in this case I was very pleased with the linkage of stories and the ending. Had I been more gripped from the beginning, I would have given it a ‘4’.