The queen of the goon squad
Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit From The Goon Squad, is back with a dazzling new novel but, she tells Cyan Turan, she still can’t quite believe her own hype
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan talks believing your own hype
Her last novel won the Pulitzer Prize and catapulted her to global literary fame, so you’d forgive author Jennifer Egan for being a little starry. But she isn’t. At all. In fact, as she tells me over the phone from her home in Brooklyn, she’s astonished by her own accomplishments.
“I never assumed I would succeed, and remain in a state of wonderment. It’s still unbelievable, an amazing dream that I don’t have to wake up from.”
That’s thanks to a masterful knack for writing books that are both literary dazzlers and page-turning bestsellers. They’re the kind you guzzle in one gulp, but that mysteriously avoid categorisation, instead ping-ponging their way around the vagaries of human experience. Her 2010 novel, A Visit From The Goon
Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, selling 280,000 copies, and propelling her profile skywards. Critics praised the innovative structure of 13 interconnecting stories, and one chapter is written as a Powerpoint presentation.
The headlines followed (“The best living American novelist” hailed Time) but Egan wasn’t sucked into the ‘literati’ scene because, having lived in New York since 1987, she “already knew about that world” thanks to a job “reading the slush pile” at The Paris Review. It was her passport to the inner sanctum of New York’s creative elites and gave the then publishing junior and »
flailing writer her fill of that world, all while she was
“still anonymous”.
Now 55, she reflects, “Excitement for that life can only encompass you once.” Life is less glitzy soirées, more “needing to make dinner” for her two teenage sons with theatre-director husband David Herskovits. “When the thrill of that life passes, you’ve moved on,” she admits.
Having read one of 150 advance proofs of her new book, Manhattan Beach, I can confirm the seven-year wait is worth it. Her first historical novel, it follows Anna, a diver at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II, as she tries to piece together the murky events that led to her father’s disappearance when she was a child.
I FIND IT REFRESHING, ESPECIALLY NOWADAYS, THAT AN AUTHOR WOULD IGNORE THE PRESSURE TO PRODUCE.
Egan, though, hopes future books won’t take so long. “Now I’ve said it, I have to stick to it,” she laughs. Attributing the gap to Goon
Squad’s intense promotional activity (“A writer is lucky to have that success once in a career. I was in my mid-forties, and wanted to ride the wave until I’d absolutely beached!”), and writing journalism for the likes of The New Yorker, Egan only began doubling down on
Manhattan Beach in 2012. She is mindful, though, that “a certain amount of life”, a “recalibration”, had to happen before she could write it, because “shaking off the hangover” from the previous book takes time. “The voice and mindset are so different. I can’t just summon up a new one instantaneously. I’m never going to write a book a year, but I’m aiming for every three rather than every seven!”
Egan says she is at her best when writing about unfamiliar people and things. “Between books, I have to throw out everything I did before, because the tools I’ve used to write the previous book will not only not work for the next project, they will ruin it.” She describes this period as one of “extreme discomfort”, her skills “ill-suited to the task”. Egan’s driving force is disrupting the reader’s experience of what a book should be, and that takes intense work. “I have to use my unconscious. What I can think of consciously is too pedestrian.”
Hilary Mantel, she says, innovates in this way. William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, too, is “that perfect tincture of surprise and inevitability that, as a reader, I’m craving and, as a writer, I’m trying to fulfil. If I can think of a few ways the story could resolve, it had bloody well better not be any of those ways! Life itself is so surprising, a predictable story is unsatisfying. The process takes a lot of time, dead ends, and 100 or 200 crap pages.” She starts not with a character or plot, but atmosphere, and writes using pen and paper. If that’s what it takes to write books that blow the mind and break the heart, power to her.
Manhattan Beach started life in 2004, when the atmosphere that intrigued Egan was the “watery edges” of the city she calls home. During World War II, the Brooklyn waterfront was a hive of industry. Years later, she visited the yard, now only frequented by New Yorkers “attending the vehicle pound when they [get] their car towed”. She found it had lain untouched for 50 years and, on discovering that women worked there, had her inspiration. Enter Anna,
Manhattan Beach’s spirited, daring protagonist (“It’s not about being nice,” says Egan, but “writers and readers need to be able to follow the logic of why characters make certain choices”).
The book she’s writing now, a contemporary novel, will be complicated, however, because the truth is becoming stranger than fiction. How do you pen fantastical, boundarystretching fiction when the reality is more bizarre and terrifying than anyone could have imagined?
“[The US] feels like it did after 9/11; there’s been a violent reordering of our psychological landscape,” Egan sighs. “I don’t know what I, as a writer, would do if I hadn’t been writing a historical novel at the time of the election. For fiction writers, it’s difficult to not account for the change, but how can you, when newspapers read like sci-fi?
“[Trump] has an instinct for surprising, unnerving and unsettling his audience but, unfortunately, he is trying to govern. It’s freaking scary.”
Egan juggles writing novels and journalism with parenting her now-teenage boys and is a self-confessed workaholic. “I feel I’m getting nothing done, and yet, little by little, things seem to happen.” Things are easier now her children are old enough to “do their own thing”.
COMPARISON is painful. When you feel IRRELEVANT, that has NOTHING to do with what you’re capable of
Though she wants to be productive, her first priority is family life, which, at first, she found “very uncomfortable”. Once her children leave home, Egan is planning “intense working years. I’ve done the ‘mum thing’. Now I want to hit the ground running with work.”
Describing herself as “a late bloomer”, Egan never thought she would succeed, having said before that, during her twenties and thirties, she was “never on any ‘ones to watch’ lists”. Despite astronomic success, she says, “That feeling persists.”
“I LIKE TO DISSOLVE, TO FORGET ABOUT WHO I AM.
I’ve never meditated, but through writing I’m absorbed by the larger world and find relief in that, which is at odds with seeing myself triumphing. Being successful has nothing to do with what has made writing not just rewarding but essential to me. It seemed impossible anything I would ever do would ever matter.”
When she finished her first novel, The Invisible
Circus, though, Egan knew she needed to promote it, despite a fear of public speaking so bad she couldn’t toast two friends at their wedding. “I took beta blockers and cobbled together a book tour, paying for part of it myself. The tour didn’t come from having a huge ego, but the assumption I and the book would be invisible unless I took care of it out in the world.”
This self-effacement – Imposter Syndrome, perhaps – is classic Jennifer Egan. And following up a Pulitzer winner hasn’t been without its pressures.
“Maybe I’ll have to wake up from it now?” she ruminates. “Maybe everyone will hate Manhattan Beach?
Working on it was hard, partly because I felt the pressure of expectation, and worried about disappointing people.” Solace came from reminding herself “it made absolutely no difference to anyone if I never wrote again”.
Thankfully, Egan has become more accustomed to the spotlight and, in June, delivered a speech to students at her alma mater, Pennsylvania State University. Her advice is gold dust: “Comparison is painful. Don’t be cowed by other people’s pretty pictures. When you feel unimpressive, or irrelevant, that has nothing to do with what you’re actually capable of.” Egan’s own approach to social media is refreshing: “My inclination is to not display my life at all,” she says. “I use Twitter for work and don’t have social media on my phone,” admitting she would have been a “sitting duck” for comparison anxiety had it been around when she was young.
While Egan is personally disinterested, professionally, she’s fascinated by the “serpentine ways image culture penetrates our experience”. I’m also reminded of a scene in Goon Squad, where a promoter pays 50 ‘parrots’ to feign adoration for a musician to sell out an upcoming concert. It sounds uncannily like the brand/influencer dynamic proliferating today, but Egan saw it years ago.
In Manhattan Beach’s acknowledgements, she thanks her husband and sons for making her “real life so fun”. This ‘real life’, she tells me, is “super conventional”, something she’s grateful for, having had a “chaotic” upbringing as the child of divorced parents (“My dad lived in a different place, but I don’t want it to sound like a sob story,” she caveats). Egan and her family have “a normal Brooklyn family life”: trips to her sons’ baseball games (“baseball is a great lens through which to look at American culture”) and “tons of theatre”, thanks to Herskovits’s job. She’s never owned a car, preferring to walk, and eavesdrop on the subway: “There’s nothing like a pair of earpods to make everyone think you can’t hear them. I have a great life. Its stability is a pleasure to me.”
Is there anything she knows now she wishes she’d known when she started? “I grew up thinking you’re either a winner in the world, or you’re not. I presumed I was not. I had no reason to think I would be and my inclination is towards self-deprecation. I wish I’d known no one was judging my every move, but I’m still like this!”
When our conversation ends, she checks I have all
I need for this piece, as if she hasn’t given enough in the hour I’ve spent milking her mind for quotes and anecdotes. Yes, she’s a rarified mind, a bona fide publishing star, but is still beset by the same fears as the rest of us. There’s no arrogance, no lofty judgments, no empty platitudes. Just buckets of eagerly imparted wisdom and really, really good books.