Moving tale exploring dynamic between a runaway dad and daughter tracing his past
In his recent Nobel acceptance speech, Bob Dylan made a simple but important point that art’s function — for him, but perhaps more generally — is primarily to move people.
I kept coming back to this remark while reading the fifth novel by Jennifer Egan, whose fourth, A Visit from the Goon Squad, won the Pulitzer six years ago.
Her debut, 1995’s The Invisible Circus, about a teenager haunted by the suicide of her Sixties-radical sister, and who retraces her doomed trip across Europe, is a rather earnest coming-of-age tale.
The tricksy Goon Squad, which follows a number of characters working in the US music industry over a number of decades, ditches the sincerity for something much wittier, but with a self-conscious post-modernity that sometimes ill-serves its characters.
With this historical novel, the hardiness of a good old-fash- ioned plot allows the reader to be genuinely affected by the protagonists’ plights.
Its heroine, Anna Kerrigan, is the child of a mid-level bagman in Depression-era Brooklyn, who is both intimately drawn into her father’s world and then cast adrift in it after one day he doesn’t return home from work.
Fascinated by her vanished father’s dealings in the underworld of New York’s waterfront, Anna takes a job in the Brooklyn Naval Yard as the Second World War breaks out and improbably — but convincingly — becomes a deep-sea diver repairing ships. At the same time she delves into her father’s past and begins to fathom what happened to him.
The maritime experiences of both father and daughter are often beautifully rendered, but it’s their relationship that elevates this novel above Egan’s earlier books.
Anna’s abandonment and her father’s final redemption provide a kind of mythic heft.
Both characters are put through separate baptisms of fire — one erotic, one martial.
They are drawn with a muscular lyricism and operatic grandeur. Egan has talked of The Sopranos as an inspiration for her fiction.
As with some of the most compelling stories, this one is about the ties of kinship and the shifting, irrevocable hall of mirrors that emerge between parents and children.
It’s a slow-burner, but genuinely affecting. It moves for all the right reasons.