Jennifer Egan’s ‘Manhattan Beach’ is a deep dive
Historical novel reflects author’s familiar themes
Jennifer Egan has written a rich, brilliant, capacious new historical novel called Manhattan Beach. What on earth made her do it?
From the beginning of her career, Egan’s fiction has been experimental and enigmatic, hovering just at the outer edge of realism. The book that made her seriously famous, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2011 novel A Visit From the Goon Squad, had a chapter made up of PowerPoint slides. It also had a tender heart; her clever manipulations of convention, designed in her early work to demand uneasy questions of the reader, softened into a means of contemplating transience and mortality.
Manhattan Beach (Scribner, 433 pp., eeeg out of four) picks up those themes — but in a traditional, occasionally even sentimental fashion.
The book (which has been long-listed for the National Book Award) is set for the most part in New York during World War II, where a young woman named Anna Kerrigan works as part of the war effort at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. She has a difficult life (her father is missing, her sister severely disabled) but she has a vision, too. From her window she can see the Navy’s divers in the river, and her soul leaps toward them: She wants to dive.
The novel’s second major character is Anna’s father’s old em- ployer, a dashing nightclub owner named Dexter Styles. By his marriage and foresight he has managed to go mostly clean. “He liked the thought that his own power would one day be refined into translucence,” Egan writes, “with no memory of the blood and earth that had generated it.” When his path crosses Anna’s, though, that ambition comes into doubt.
Egan has every gift a writer can possess, and like all of her work, Manhattan Beach is radiant with intelligence, special simply because it’s by her. Take Anna’s determination to become the Navy’s first female diver: the best metaphors make their own intimations without authorial assistance, and diving, the murk of it, the groping, the risk, comes so beautifully in Manhattan Beach to resemble Anna’s feeling of uncertainty as she examines her past.
Still, it is only Egan’s talent and effort — there are more than 100 names in the acknowledgments — that keep this novel afloat of its genre, coaxing a little fresh life out of the most overdramatized period in American history. The best parts of Manhattan Beach (one breathtaking set piece describes a shipwreck) are often just tangentially historical. She’s not Hilary Mantel, who as if by a miracle returned an epoch to its laboratory state.
It’s interesting, then, to contemplate her motivations. A generation of writers is beginning to age out of its youthful allegiance to the postmodern influence of DeLillo and Barthelme, among them Egan, Jonathan Franzen, Colson Whitehead and George Saunders.
Manhattan Beach is, radically, a book without radical impulse. An ironist might be suspicious of its concerns: parting, loss, family, war. But perhaps it’s mostly young novelists who burn to remake the world.
Egan, at 55, has turned her virtuosic skills toward recapturing it. The result is moving, mournful and often profound. “The afternoon,” Robert Frost wrote, “knows what morning never suspected.”