10.15.2015

Literary Chicago - Jennifer Egan, 'Emerald City and Other Stories'

From 'Emerald City':
"So there it hung, golden, straight as paper, reminiscent of beaches he'd never seen, being as he was from Chicago (in Chicago there was the lake, but that didn't count)."
From 'The Watch Trick':
"They'd been hearing the story for years in various forms - from the Hawaiian tour guide Sonny fell in love with while gazing at the view from Kaala Peak, threatening to jump unless she agreed to come back to Chicago with him;"

"Sonny would squire them from one Chicago nightclub to the next, and each time they went inside she felt they were expected, that the party could really begin now that they had arrived."
From 'Puerto Vallarta:'
"While her father was in Australia, Ellen went with her friend Renata to Mama Santos, a Mexican restaurant in Glencoe. It was a train ride outside Chicago, but Renata's brother, Eric, was a bartender there and had promised to serve the alcohol."

"Her father explained that Ed had owned a company in Chicago that went bankrupt three years before. Now he was being sued by his former investors."
As a bonus, I'm always on the lookout for cliches, and when writers reuse phrases, that may have seemed clever at first, but not after awhile. So in two stories in this collection, a mere eight pages apart, we have two instances of palm trees that sounded like rain. Goes to show that even a great writer like Egan isn't always at full strength.

Overall, this collection was uneven. I liked some of the eleven stories, and some I could have done without. A Visit From the Good Squad was fantastic, so I'm still interested in more Egan. It was fun reading stories set in San Francisco where I just was (and where I bought this book), but it was too focused on family and couples drama. Someone cheats on someone in every single story it seems. It gets a bit tired.

No comments:

Post a Comment