‘Beach’ plunges deep into cunning historical tale
Jennifer Egan’s “Manhattan Beach” follows her Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Visit From the Goon Squad” (2010), a brilliant tour de force that braided the lifelines of a large cast of characters into one ingeniously intricate pattern. The new novel is fairly straightforward in construction but superbly devious in plot — its characters time and again blind to the true nature of the situations in which they find themselves.
Anna, the elder of Eddie and Agnes Kerrigan’s two daughters, is 11 years old in the mid-1930s when we meet her. She is accompanying her father on a visit to Dexter Styles, some kind of a big shot living in a mansion on Manhattan Beach, the place in overwhelming contrast to the Kerrigans’ tenement apartment in Brooklyn.
Eddie, a longshoreman whom hard times have thrown out of a job, has been working as a bagman for John Dunellen, a corrupt union boss (“a big man with savage dock walloper’s hands” who “gave a drooping, corroded impression, like a freighter gone to rust after being too long at anchor”). Now, visiting Styles, Eddie hopes to move his game up a notch in order to afford an invalid’s chair for his severely handicapped younger daughter, Lydia.
Anna is not at all sure what’s going on, but whatever it is, it changes her relationship with her father. In the past, she had been his companion as he paid visits to this or that person, passing on discreet envelopes before leaving. Now she is left at home as he goes about his mysterious business. When Eddie disappears three years later, she believes that Dexter Styles is somehow involved.
The novel leaps to wartime. Eddie is still missing; and Anna has been working in the Brooklyn Naval Yard inspecting parts for the battleship Missouri. One night out with a friend, she discovers that Styles is a nightclub owner — with, it emerges, any number of shady operations on the side. Using an assumed name, she makes it her business to cultivate a friendship of sorts with him — thereby generating a great and frightening part of the story.
She has also become entranced by the divers she sees emerging from the sea and their work on the underwater hulls of the great ships. She wants to be one, and, in the face of hostile incredulity from the powers that be, she succeeds.
The novel is a great exercise in storytelling power, throwing out two buttressing tales: that of Eddie Kerrigan, who was raised in a charitable institution for Catholic children — and whose later adventures create almost unendurable suspense; and of Dexter Styles, who balances marriage into a powerful, upper-crust banking family with his role in the underworld, beholden to an ancient mob boss, Mr. Q. This deeply unsavory creature is adept in the cultivation of out-of-season tomatoes — rarities that come to serve a chillingly revelatory purpose.
Egan’s extraordinary virtuosity of description and evoking a historical milieu are on display throughout “Manhattan Beach,” which is alive with fully realized, brilliantly rendered characters; even minor players are picked out in unforgettable detail.
This truly fine novel, so rich in period and emotional atmosphere and so cunningly plotted, is a joy (and a terror) — one of the standouts of the year.