Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Jennifer Egan’s latest novel’s a resplendent tale of a family
Jennifer Egan’s sixth book of fiction, “Manhattan Beach, arrives. I flip to the back. I read, in the acknowledgments, notes about research that began in 2004, indications of an instinctive curiosity about “the historical dominance of New York City’s waterfront,” news about a lucky trove of wartime letters and an oral history project concerning the Brooklyn Naval Yard.
I flip to the front, to the sturdy, unpretentious first sentence: “They’d driven all the way to Mr. Styles’s house before Anna realized that her father was nervous.” I read on, through sentences like this: “Miniature waves struggled up under skins of ice that crackled when she stomped them.”. The pages turn, the hours tick, “Manhattan Beach” unfolds and unfolds, and I am certain: The book in my hands is an inviolable vessel.
“Manhattan Beach” is a historical novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” Its “oldfashioned” emphasis on seamless plot and complex characters feels shockingly, and reassuringly, new. The story belongs primarily to Anna, that girl we meet in the opening sentence. She’s the daughter of a man who is desperate to support a family in need — a father who makes a bad choice. She’s the sister of Lydia, born gorgeous and disabled. She’s an instinctive mechanic whose hands know what to do with a Lionel train, a rope, a screw. And when her father disappears and she ends up working in the naval yard, Anna is led into a life of death-defying diving, not to mention dangerous interludes with that well-bred and also nefarious Mr. Styles.
Egan builds her story with the countless particulars of her chosen era — America at war, Americans at nightclubs, gangsters and sailors and union workers all fighting for a slice of a diminished post-Depression pie. She percolates the story with Flossie Flirt dolls, a ’28 Duesenberg Model J (Niagara blue), the charitable ladies of the New York Catholic Protectory, Benny Goodman-style swing, and such a profusion of details regarding big-ship construction and underwater repair that you’d expect to be just slightly inclined to read a little faster through those pages, but you are not. Egan makes dressing for a dive (“The dress weighs two hundred pounds. The hat alone weighs fifty-six.”) a matter of high suspense and metaphor:
Eventually, “Manhattan Beach” will take readers onto the high seas and into “Treasure Island”-style adventure. It will pit Anna’s desire to do the work she was born to do against the casualties of poorly considered decisions. It will recreate the gargantuan operation of the naval docks and the intimacy of friendships and jealousies. It will maintain a running conversation with the sea, about which Egan writes so masterfully that we may never again see the ocean quite the same way.
Within all of this, Egan also creates a narrative about Anna and Lydia — a profoundly moving story about one sister’s desire to give the gift of life to one to whom, it seems, life has been denied. In a novel about war, grift, betrayal and desertion, there are also scenes like this:
“Manhattan Beach” is a whole story sprung from a whole imagination. It yields a world that, with all its mystery, its shades of dark and light, its yearnings and its satisfactions, feels most resplendently true.