A castle, a secret map, and a baroness make for an intriguing journey
The Keep
By Jennifer Egan
Knopf, 240 pp., $23.95
If Kafka's Joseph K. and Lewis Carroll's Alice had a son, he would have to be Jennifer Egan's Danny. Searching for an entrance to his cousin's mysterious castle, Danny tumbles into strange new realities again and again, leaning too far out windows, descending into underground chambers, dropping into a murky pool, and even tripping over rabbit holes.
In her latest novel, ``The Keep," Egan proves that post modern allegory can be fun. No matter how many symbols and zany subplots she juggles, and even though she drops a few, the novelist keeps the action moving and the irony biting. Her narrator, Ray, is as unreliable as they come, but he's also funny and insightful.
Danny is a New York wheeler-dealer deprived of his cell phone and thrown into an exotic world that keeps morphing back and forth between his own psyche, our collective subconscious, and a real world full of sharp rocks and dangerous caves. He gets a call from his cousin Howard inviting him to Eastern Europe to help out with Howard's project of turning a medieval castle into an electronics-free hotel/retreat. In spite of the fact that Danny has barely seen Howard for years -- since as teenagers he and a friend had taken the boy through twisting passages deep into an underground cavern, pushed him into a freezing pool, and left him there -- Danny agrees to go.
After finally making contact with Howard, his factotum Mick, and his crew of graduate students , Danny remains puzzled about why he's there. Will he be punished for the childhood trauma he caused his cousin? Maybe, but in a post modern novel, things are unlikely to be that simple.
The castle has lots of interesting features. There's the murky future swimming pool: ``You know how I think of this?" Howard asks. ``The Imagination Pool. You dive in and -- bang -- your imagination is released ."
Then there's the keep. Howard's not allowed to touch the keep, because the baroness still lives there. What, precisely, is a keep? Egan's characters keep explaining this, each time making it seem a bit more symbolic. We all need an inner keep, Egan seems to be telling us. Danny figures this out: ``Danny used to think of his heart as that strong place, but now he had a better word: The keep. "
Meanwhile, the narrator, Ray, has been revealed to be a con, writing the story for his prison creative writing class . We know that he is one of the characters in his own story, but we can't be sure which one.
Back at the castle, Danny illicitly explores the keep, where he meets baroness, gets baroness, loses baroness, then falls out the window and is severely injured. During his convalescence, he checks out a nearby town, where he finds a mysterious map. Unless it was all just a delirious, brain-damaged dream.
Real or not, he ends up back at the castle, where the map helps the crew find a network of underground passages. Everybody's down there, and the baroness locks them in. They look to Danny for rescue.
Where it all ends up, or what it points toward, maybe Howard's graduate students will have to tell us. They will have fun trying to figure it all out, and so will Egan's readers.
Merrill Kaitz lives in Amesbury and is author of ``The Great Boston Trivia and Fact Book." See ``Bookings," Page D6, for information on a local appearance by Jennifer Egan. 
