Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist to speak here
The New Yorker recently described Jennifer Egan as “as famous as a contemporary American literary novelist can expect to be.”
It’s a statement that Ms. Egan doesn’t dispute, exactly. But it’s also not one that she takes seriously.
“Whether it’s true or not, fame as a novelist is not even fame as we think of it in America right now … Thank God,” she said in a phone interview. “It’s not like anyone knows who I am.”
Ms. Egan will speak at 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland. She will sign books after the event. Tickets are $15-$35. For tickets: www.pittsburghlectures.org, 412-622-8866 or at the door.
Ms. Egan’s bio is a touch more glamorous than your typical novelist. She dated Steve Jobs while she was in college. She worked as a model.
And over the last two decades, Ms. Egan has slowly built her reputation writing innovative books full of up-to-the-minute observations of contemporary society. “Look at Me,” a finalist for the
National Book Award in 2001, is about a model whose face was disfigured in an accident. “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, included a chapter written as a PowerPoint presentation. She followed that with “Black Box,” a short story released as a series of tweets. For her latest novel, Ms. Egan did what — for her — was unexpected: a traditional, lushly researched work of historical fiction.
“Manhattan Beach” tells the story of Anna Kerrigan, a 19-year-old who dreams of working as a diver in the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II. Anna is haunted by the mystery of her father, Eddie, who disappeared five years prior, and thinks that Dexter Styles, a mobster she met once as a child, may be the key to solving the mystery.
In a sense, Ms. Egan has been working on the book since Sept. 11, 2001.
“My curiosity about New York during the war started during 9/11,” she said. “New York became a war zone very suddenly, literally overnight.”
She began researching wartime New York City “in kind of a desultory, experiential way” starting in 2005, conducting more than a dozen interviews as part of an oral history project about the Navy Yard. She tried on a 200-pound World War IIera diving suit in 2009. And while she didn’t start writing the book until 2012, her research carried some sense of urgency.
Ms. Egan recalled meeting a World War II veteran who said he had encountered a Russian female diver during the war and planned to interview him about it in more detail.
“I was dying to talk to him, and he suddenly passed away,” she said. “He was in perfect health. You can’t put off those conversations — I really learned a lesson.”
When Ms. Egan did eventually sit down to write the book, after “A Visit from the Goon Squad” was published, she intended to again write a time-jumping, generationspanning novel, starting in World War II New York and ending in the present. But this time, it didn’t work.
“What I was trying to do was use a device I used a lot in ‘Goon Squad,’ to leap into the future or into the past,” she said. “What I found was that that was really unnecessary or even annoying. It just seemed gratuitous, almost manipulative or condescending. The reader and I both know we’re in the present, and in fact, the fun of this book was in this sort of illusion, which we’re all aware is an illusion, of being in the past. I let it go completely, and it was a relief.”
Remaining firmly in the past also meant that Ms. Egan wouldn’t be touching on many of the contemporary themes — technology and image culture — that she’d built her career on.
“It was kind of nice not to be dealing with this technology that has become so pervasive,” she said. “Getting away from small screens altogether waskind of a pleasure.”
That said, the writing wasn’t easy. Telling the story in a linear fashion meant that Ms. Egan had to maintain momentum through her own pacing, not to mention incorporating multiple settings, genres and characters.
“This book, in certain ways, is pretty crazy,” she said. “I guess that’s all just to say that it had its own challenges, and they were fun to deal with.”