While the rest of her family, and the old friends and old loves of Faith are all more or less living their own lives already, Phoebe still sleeps in her sister’s room, idolizes every small memento left behind by Faith, and devotes her life to understanding (and following in the footsteps of) her sister. But Phoebe doesn’t care either about adulthood, or about enjoying her teenage years – all she’s interested in is her late sister, Faith, who died 8 years earlier, who was loved and admired by everyone who knew her, and whose death Phoebe cannot get over. The heroine of the novel is 18-year old Phoebe, standing on the brink of adulthood. The novel explores several other themes but I don’t attempt to write about all of them – I’ll mostly focus on time here. The reason for this suspicion is that – just like in her Pulitzer-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad – the main (almost living) characters of this novel are the 70s and time in general – time wasted, time lost.
I have no idea, either, what Egan’s teenage years felt like (she was born in 1962), but I have a strong suspicion that the 70s were quite a memorable period for her. Jennifer Egan is in possession of both the ability to perceive and the ability to put her perceptions to paper – and I’m thoroughly amazed by her. I can get it if someone has the wonderfully eerie ability to instinctively understand human emotions and tangled relations, and all the ways things can be awesome and things can suck – but this ability combined with the talent to be able to write it all down is something rare and precious. However, as Phoebe's journey continues, a series of visions of Faith pushes her mind to the brink.I have no idea how Jennifer Egan does this. Phoebe hopes to discover and experience the life that led to her sister's death by retracing her footsteps, which eventually leads to Wolf (Christopher Eccleston) - Faith's boyfriend. After learning that her sister, Faith (Cameron Diaz), has committed suicide in Portugal, Phoebe (Jordana Brewster), an 18-year-old hippie, decides to uproot from her San Francisco home to travel to Europe.
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