Seven novels about selling your soul

Jennifer Banash is a former professor of English and creative writing, and author of the novels Silent Alarm, a finalist for the American Library Association’s Best Fiction for Young Adults; White Lines; Simply Irresistible; In Too Deep; and The Elite.

Her new novel is The Rise and Fall of Ava Arcana.

At Electric Lit Banash tagged seven "books about losing your way on the climb to the top, where the pursuit of fame and power beyond your wildest dreams may be the ultimate devil’s bargain." One title on the list:

Look at Me by Jennifer Egan

I have always been fascinated by celebrity, but even more so by imposters. Growing up, I devoured all of Highsmith’s Ripley books like candy. Egan’s Look at Me is, in my opinion, an overlooked masterpiece, light-years ahead of its time in prefiguring our current obsession with influencer culture. Egan’s novel is the story of two Charlottes: Charlotte Swenson, a model, who after a horrific car wreck, is left with eighty titanium screws in her face, and her namesake, the daughter of her best friend from high school, a precocious suburban teen coming of age in small town Illinois. Although the surgery model Charlotte endures after the crash succeeds in restoring her former beauty, she is now weirdly unrecognizable, a veritable stranger in the glamorous world she once occupied so seamlessly. Eventually, she becomes involved with an Internet start-up seeking to monetize the lives of both “Ordinary” and “Extraordinary” people, and her alter-ego becomes a viral sensation for viewers to obsess over, watching and cataloging her every move. The novel explores how and why identities shift throughout the course of a life, and how one’s teenage years are a catalyst for the person we will one day become. But most of all, it serves as a warning of the very real dangers of constructing an identity for the sole purpose of mass consumption.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Look At Me is among Jenny Shank's five big, engrossing books and Julie Christie's seven favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue