Family links in a noir-ish light
Jennifer Egan’s new novel, Manhattan Beach, opens with a young girl, Anna, sitting in a Niagara blue 1928 Duesenberg Model J while her father, Eddie Kerrigan, drives toward Coney Island. Anna senses her father is uncharacteristically apprehensive.
We eventually learn he’s headed to his potential new boss’ house in Manhattan Beach. This boss, Dexter Styles, is a New York City gaming kingpin. Soon Eddie will go missing and Anna will spend much of the novel working to understand her father’s choices and fate. Along the way, she will fashion her own vexed bonds with Styles.
This is a layered, beautiful book in which Egan expertly immerses us in the world of pre-war and World War II New York City. We become acquainted with Houdini-like episodes, girls in peplum skirts, men with brilliantined hair, soda shops, streetcars, wartime ship-repair divers, and battleships in dry dock at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
It gives New York a noir-ish cast and reading it is like being wrapped up in a Rex Stout detective novel while being invited to share the intimate inner life of a young woman in the way you are when you read an Alice Munro story. Manhattan Beach is a finely detailed and compelling book that is at its heart about the complex connections between fathers and daughters.
Egan’s monumental novel calls to mind the knotty father-daughter connection in another recent novel about World War II, Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See. Parts of Manhattan Beach also recall Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar.
Like Doerr’s book and Nolan’s film, it ushers us into an expansive representation of what feels like another world. Yet what keeps us there is not only the epic feel of the story but also the moving, subtle, nearly inexpressible depiction of a daughter and her father and how they lose and find each other over time.
MANHATTAN BEACH
by Jennifer Egan (Corsair, $38) Reviewed by Maggie Trapp
As in her previous works, Egan writes passages so well-crafted that they lift right off the page and sing.
After Anna listens to her mother calmly taking in Anna’s aunt’s aria of gripes, we read, “Anna’s mother always said just enough to keep Brianne talking; she was the maypole around which Anna’s aunt braided the ribbons of her knowledge and gossip and ghoulish revelations.”
Later, when Eddie is out at sea: “The night was cool and clear, with a rolling sea just visible under a paring of moon.
“Eddie couldn’t see the ships around theirs, but he perceived their density, five hundred feet away fore and aft, a thousand feet abeam, nosing together through the swells like a spectral herd.”
This, like much of what we read in this novel, is gorgeous, redolent prose and a pure pleasure to consume.