One never knows exactly who the main character is in Jennifer Egan's latest novel, The Keep. In this onion of a book, the reader keeps peeling back layer after layer — to reveal an even more intriguing and engrossing plot — without ever being sure which of the three main characters is speaking, or which is even real.

The book begins with Danny, an aimless, thirty-something New Yorker, arriving late one night at an Eastern European Gothic castle, to which Danny's cousin Howard has summoned him in order to help convert the castle into a hotel. It is soon revealed that Howard and Danny share a traumatic childhood event that may — or may not — factor into why Howard invited Danny to the castle. It is also soon revealed that the entire story is being told by Ray, an inmate at a maximum-security New York State prison, who's taking a writing class to get away from his oppressively insane cellmate.

Here are all the tropes of a modern thriller: an ancient castle, ghoulish legends of murdered twins, instruments of torture, an evil baroness locked up in a tower, a troubled childhood secret, and an imprisoned murderer. And yet, as the story progresses, none of these potential points of conflict is revealed to be the one on which the plot turns: none is the dark secret it seemed at first to be.

One has to respect Egan for offering the reader such potentially lucrative plot points and then choosing to let them lie. They serve the essential purpose of drawing the reader into the story and driving the plot at a relentless pace. Yet Egan somehow manages to deftly manipulate them without allowing the narrative to falter. The story being told is not about Danny, or Howard, or Ray, or even the ancient castle and the murdered twins. The story is about imagination as a path toward healing and escape. It is about the power of fiction to both imprison and set free.

Egan has crafted a world in which all of the characters are imprisoned in one way or another (if not in a physical jail or labyrinth or keep, then in various mental squirrel-cages, including addiction), but she has also given us the key: a world in which magical thinking actually works.

-Sage Van Wing