Egan shows a poet’s hand
It’s been seven years since Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for A Visit from the Goon Squad, a work of fiction so formally daring that no one has conclusively determined if it is actually a novel or a collection of linked stories. Combining multiple viewpoints and forms (including a chapter — or story — presented in PowerPoint), Goon Squad was the high point in Egan’s highly experimental exploration of the novel form.
Which makes the arrival of Manhattan Beach so surprising, since it is one of those historical novels impossible to summarize without recourse to hackneyed phrases such as “set against the backdrop of” and “spanning X number of years.” It also has an eminently likable heroine best described as plucky, headstrong and unconventional.
The backdrop and time span are, respectively, New York City (especially Brooklyn) during Prohibition, the Great Depression and the Second World War, while Anna Kerrigan, a seemingly dutiful Irish-American girl, plays the plucky heroine.
In the novel’s opening scenes, 11-year-old Anna accompanies her father Eddie on one of his errands for Dunellen, an epically corrupt union leader. A former stockbroker, Eddie has been reduced by the Wall Street crash to playing bagman for Dunellen. Eddie’s duties that day bring him and Anna to the beachfront home of enigmatic gangster and family man Dexter Styles, whom Eddie is hoping to go to work for. Although Anna remains blissfully unaware of her father’s dangerous double dealings, the meeting between him and Dexter will drastically alter her future and that of her mother and severely disabled sister.
The core of the novel follows Anna’s dogged pursuit of two parallel goals: to secure a job as a diver at the Brooklyn Navy Yard (where thousands of women were hired to support the war effort), and uncover the causes of her father’s mysterious disappearance not long after his meeting with Dexter.
The novel’s premise and central characters are so firmly set in the orbit of conventional historical fiction that the reader may be tempted to suspect a trick on Egan’s part. Will she pull the rug out from our expectations with a bold deconstruction of the form? Will the novel zip forward 150 years into the future, where Anna’s great-great granddaughter toils in some intergalactic space port?
Instead of taking readers on another deep dive into postmodernism, Egan sets her sights on a homelier goal: to deliver the type of socially engaged, elegantly written family saga perfected by the late Victorians. That goal — and its undeniable ac- complishment — may disappoint some readers, but most will likely be quite happy with the results.
Manhattan Beach is a pleasure to read, with vivid images and turns of phrase on almost every page. Looking down on the Brooklyn shipyard from an office window, Anna is overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the work below: “In the dry docks, ships were held in place by hundreds of filament ropes, like Gulliver tied to the beach.” The image of a prone Gulliver not only captures the surreal contrast between the massive ships and their tiny builders, it reminds readers of the childlike wonder we often feel when confronted by a technological marvel.
In another scene, two characters are reunited after many years apart: “Time had enlarged him in an organic, mineral way, like a tree trunk, or salts accreting in a cave.” Here the images evoke both the physical and emotional effects of passing time on the body and emotions. In these passages and countless others, Egan demonstrates a poet’s talent for making the reader resee and re-experience the familiar, and yet her prose is rarely flashy or statically “poetic.”
The dialogue occasionally reads as if it was lifted from a snappy 1930s gangster film, and there are a number of historical details that stick in the mind like half-digested chunks of research, but otherwise Egan pulls off a rare feat: delivering an intellectually and emotionally engaging work of historical fiction. James Grainger is the author of Harmless.