Novel follow-up:
7 years since best-seller, Jennifer Egan primed for productivity
“Goon Squad” author Jennifer Egan back with “Manhattan Beach.”
Goonnovelfans There— that Squad”and was won hera — long Jennifernewlythe seven-year multifaceted,releasedEgan a hiatus follow-up,Pulitzer phantasmagoricalbetweenPrize “Manhattanand“A Visita host best-sellingBeach.”Fromof new the And she’s not any happier about it than anyone else. “I hope that never happens again,” Egan said firmly during a recent interview in the elegantly inviting Pacific Heights home of her mother and stepfather. “I’m too old to have another gap like that if I’m going to get done what I need to get done.” As it happens, Egan is just 55, with a proven track record of literary accomplishment that includes not only “Goon Squad” but also the sprawling and inventive “Look at Me” (whose reflections on international terrorism, conceived well before 9/11, proved prophetic) and the dazzling, quasi-Gothic hall of mirrors titled “The Keep.”
But she’s also got an agenda, and an eye on the clock.
“I have intimations of at least seven different worlds I want to explore, and if each one of those is a book, then we’re talking about ...” and here Egan launched into an extended bout of calculations, pitting writing time against life expectancy like some kind of bookish actuary. Suffice it to say that she’s already filling notepads with the first draft of her next novel.
Of course, it isn’t as though Egan just came off years of kicking around in her bathrobe. You only have to spend an hour with her to understand how deeply her work ethic runs, or to recognize the level of energy and commitment she brings to even the most mundane task. Beneath her ebullience and grace you can detect traces of a fierce will.
And “Manhattan Beach,” a fantastically detailed evocation of life on the New York waterfront during World War II, gives its own evidence of how labor-intensive the act of creating it must have been. Not in the prose, which is as beveled and fine-grained as ever, but in the sheer scale on which Egan has conjured up a vanished history.
Much of “Manhattan Beach” takes place in and around the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where hordes of young women had been suddenly injected into the workforce for the first time to support the Allied war effort. There are long, informative discursions on scuba diving and the sociology of the merchant marine, on maritime disasters and the elaborate web of ethnically stratified organized crime that grew up around the New York docks.
Naturally, all of this had to be painstakingly researched.
“I really didn’t know how to write a historical novel,” Egan said. “And I’m so reliant on time and place for my entry point to fiction that I think I was uniquely hamstrung by trying to write outside of my own lifetime.”
On the other hand, Egan has plenty of experience as a journalist — she's written frequently for the New York Times Magazine — and she was helped along by an oral history project that she’d been involved with at the navy yard several years earlier. She talked to a lot of the former workers there, women who by then were in their 80s, and got their stories about the sensations and tensions of that historical juncture.
“Lots of little details about the women and the things that happened to them found their way into the narrative. For example, the fact that the air smelled like chocolate — that was one of those details that a number of different people mentioned.”
In addition, the plot of “Manhattan Beach” kept multiplying its focus and heading off into unforeseen directions. The novel’s migration from the docks to the middle of the ocean itself caught Egan unawares. The charismatic character of Dexter Styles — a gangster and nightclub owner who has married into the genteel world of banking — muscled his way into the book and into her heart.
“The idea that known crime bosses could become fixtures of polite society might seem kind of strange now, but back then it was very common. And Dexter Styles kind of embodied that — I didn’t quite see him coming, but I could feel that there was some magnetic criminal figure in the book. I loved him, I had such a crush on him, and in a sense I was just following him into his life.”
The sense of place that is so distinctive in Egan’s fiction — whether the small-town Midwest of “Look At Me” or the contemporary San Francisco and New York of “Goon Squad” — may owe something to the geographical dislocations of her childhood. She was born in Chicago, but her parents divorced when she was a toddler. At 7, she moved to San Francisco with her mother.
“I actually have a very strong visual and sensory memory of the extreme differences between the two places,” she says. “Chicago is rusty, with the feeling of old industry, and San Francisco is so bright and light and pastel in its palette. And I would go back every summer to visit my father for a few weeks, so I was aware of those differences at an early age.”
She graduated from Lowell High School — a venue that figures prominently and recognizably in some sections of “Goon Squad” — before going to college at the University of Pennsylvania. She spent two years studying in England and backpacking through China; she worked as a fashion model; she briefly dated Steve Jobs.
In 1987, Egan settled in Brooklyn, where she now lives with her husband, David Herskovits, a theater and opera director, and their two teenage sons, about whom — at their own strict insistence — she will offer no information except that they have not read her books. That’s fine with her.
“I feel like there is something very revealing about being read, and I don’t have any particular wish to be revealed to them in that way.”
Compared to the metafictional tricks of Egan’s earlier works, with their shifts in time and slippery, hard-to-pin-down narrators, the sturdy narrative architecture of “Manhattan Beach” seems as much of a departure as its historical setting. She’s not unmindful of the effect that may have on readers — especially those who discovered her through “Goon Squad.”
“I feel like ‘Goon Squad’ is where I found an audience, and I realize that some people who loved that book may not be enchanted by the new one. I’m happy when people will stick with me from book to book, but it doesn’t always work that way and I can’t blame them.”
But readers whose devotion to Egan’s work centers on “Goon Squad” have a welcome development in store. The book she’s currently got in the works picks up some threads from that earlier masterpiece.
“‘Goon Squad’ has such an open-ended structure, and there were things I wanted to do in it, people I wanted to write about, that I couldn’t find a way to do. So in a way it always felt like the best I could do, rather than some kind of perfect, finished product. But if I can use some of the same structural principles to arrive at a new landscape, that would be really cool.”
And this time, it won’t take seven years to hit the bookstores.