What lies beneath
Audacious. Dazzling. Shape-shifting. Dizzyingly inventive. These are some of the words of praise lavished on Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2011. In 2012, she followed that Power Point-bedecked tour de force with “Black Box,” a long story released over nine days as a series of tweets on the New Yorker’s Twitter feed.
Well, Egan has managed to surprise us again with “Manhattan Beach” — not with structural innovations, but because it is an unexpectedly straightforward narrative, a historical novel set primarily in Brooklyn during World War II.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining. Given the expectations, you could say it’s daring of Egan to go more traditional and plunge deep into the wartime history of her home borough. And while her new novel may be less technically innovative, it is an unusually well written, well researched, emotionally satisfying page-turner — which demonstrates that the power of her work lies beyond virtuosic literary stunts.
“The war had shaken people loose,” Egan writes. Her sixth book revolves around a strong, remarkably fearless female protagonist, at once classic and modern, who benefits from one of the results of that shakeup — the opening of typically male jobs to women. However, still thwarted by entrenched sexism, it takes several tons of grit and talent for 19-year-old Anna Kerrigan to break into the macho world of deep-sea diving at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
The work, welding tankers 30 feet underwater while encased in 200 pounds of suffocating equipment, is tough for a claustrophobe to even read about. In the water and out, Anna navigates the tangled lines of her life, which include her determined pursuit of the truth behind her father’s disappearance five years earlier.
Egan often feeds readers information before her characters learn of it, so it takes Anna a while to figure out what readers glean in the book’s opening pages: The “errands” on which she accompanied her father as a girl were visits to the gangsters for whom he delivered cash.
After falling on hard times during the Depression, Eddie Kerrigan had gone to work for an old friend in the Irish mob and then, frustrated with his shabby treatment and measly cut, jumped ship to provide intel to a slick nightclub owner high up in the Italian syndicate.
By the time Eddie vanished in 1937, he’d already grown somewhat distant and shadowy to the three women in his life. His wife, a former Follies dancer, had become so completely absorbed in the care of Anna’s younger sister, an invalid afflicted by an unnamed birth defect (perhaps cerebral palsy), that Eddie had long felt marginalized. And Anna, his dependable sidekick, had become a teenager, prematurely distracted by the joys of sex.
The novel is awash in sea-related dualities and metaphors — surface and depth, light and shadow, ebb and flow, calm and storm, diving and floating, shore and open waters, harbor and channel. After leaving a meeting with his “poisonous fish” of a boss emptyhanded, Eddie “smelled rusty chains, planks sodden with fish oil: the very stench of corruption.”
When Anna enlists an unlikely Samaritan to help transport her severely disabled sister to see the sea for the first time, her reaction on approaching Manhattan Beach is visceral: “At the end of the street, under a gray expanse of sky, she sensed the ocean, like someone asleep.” Even her improbable, hard-boiled benefactor marvels at the sea’s striking beauty, thinking, “It was never the same on any two days, not if you really looked.”
Not all the lovely images are oceanic: There’s a memory that “faded into the distant past like an apple core flung from a train window,” and the secrets Anna dropped into her unresponsive sister’s ears over the years “like coins down a well.” Describing Anna’s first visit to a Manhattan nightclub, Egan nails her social anxiety: “She’d never been good at banter; it was like a skipping rope whose rhythm she couldn’t master enough to jump in with confidence.”
Although meticulously researched down to the divers’ 56pound brass helmets, the seamen’s “Mae West” life jackets, and the Flossie Flirt doll Anna craved as a little girl, the novel’s core — about a young, independent woman finding a way to buck tradition and live on her own terms — has a distinctly modern sensibility. This extends to Anna’s easy relationships with her talented African American fellow diver and with her Jewish friends and landlord — a social relaxation owing in part to the war’s loosening effects.
But this action-packed novel is driven as much by plot as by character, feminist undercurrents, careful details and lush prose. As the thrills zip by in rapid succession — a send-up of a mob boss’ doublespeak, risky sex and riskier dives, gangster rub-outs, German U-boats, torpedo strikes, shark attacks and a shipwreck that leaves squabbling merchant mariners adrift on a raft in the Indian Ocean 1,000 miles off the African coast — some of them strain credulity.
But Egan certainly knows how to build tension, and her novel has the makings of a terrific action adventure movie. “Manhattan Beach” is the kind of book you can immerse yourself in happily, with no special equipment to encumber you.