PositiveSalon...somewhat loosely told but quite evocative and moving ... Yet while Father Damien\'s story is the thread that holds Erdrich\'s novel together, it is but one strand in its complex design. Erdrich also weaves in the colorful sagas of reservation characters ... These ancillary stories provide intriguing glimpses into the Ojibwe culture and constitute the novel\'s brightest and most touching patches ... Although the language in some sections is evocative and pure, other passages are clunky, overwrought and downright confusing. But while the threads of Erdrich\'s work seem to grow a bit tangled here and there, viewed from a bit of a distance and taken in as a whole, the novel\'s flaws become part of the intricate pattern.
Jennifer Egan
MixedSalonEgan, not much for subtlety, makes the point she’s been getting at all along. American culture has replaced identity with image — true beauty with the idea of beauty or fashion, real nourishment with its Happy Meal equivalent — the way paper money has replaced gold coins … Egan’s message is carried by a tale of two Charlottes. The elder Charlotte is a Manhattan fashion model longing to live her life in ‘the mirrored room,’ surrounded by refracted images of herself. The book begins with a car crash — just outside her hometown, Rockford, Ill. — that alters Charlotte’s appearance. Though not disfigured, her face is unrecognizable to the fashionable set that has populated her world … Propelled by plot, peppered with insights, enlivened by quirkily astute characterizations, and displaying an impressive prescience about our newly altered world, Look at Me is more nuanced than it first appears.
