Waterfront noir is rich, atmospheric

Jennifer Egan’s “Manhattan Beach” follows her Pulitzer Prizewinning “A Visit From the Goon Squad” (2010), a brilliant tour de force which braided the lifelines of a large cast of characters into one intricate pattern. The new novel is fairly straightforward in construction but superbly devious in plot.

Anna, 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. 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. 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. She makes it her business to cultivate a friendship of sorts with him — thereby generating a frightening part of the story.

The novel is a great exercise in storytelling might, throwing out two buttressing tales: that of Eddie Kerrigan, who was raised in a charitable institution — and whose later adventures create almost unendurable suspense; and of Dexter Styles, who balances marriage into a powerful 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-ofseason tomatoes — rarities that come to serve a chillingly revelatory purpose.

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.