Book Review: "The Keep"

Jennifer Egan's The Keep is a very strange book. A story-within-a-story motif, with two narratives that find themselves clunkily connecting toward the end (shocking, isn't it?), this tries to be simultaneously a piece of gothic suspense and a prison tale. Neither end up working out very well. Reviews of this book have been incredibly disparate (with the exception of the mainstream reviewers, most of whom seemed quite pleased with it), and it's not hard to see why - some might enjoy this kind of funky-fiction. I do not. The non-use of quotation marks rankles from the outset, and the whole thing just seems like the half-worked product of a creative writing seminar.