Jennifer Egan’s elegant shift from experiment to convention.
WHY WRITING A CONVENTIONAL STORY TOOK MORE COURAGE FOR JENNIFER EGAN
At the age of 55, Jennifer Egan has emerged as that rare kind of literary artist: a novelist who can’t be classified. To prove that, we don’t have to go beyond her last two books, the fourth and fifth she has written.
In 2010, she brought out a novel crammed with wonderfully ingenious devices that placed her clearly within the category of experimental fiction. That was A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won her the Pulitzer Prize and a thick file of enthusiastic reviews, one of which called her work “post- postmodern.” At first she baffled readers ( I was in that cohort) until we caught on and realized what she was doing. Then we loved what she had accomplished, and ( again, I was typical) celebrated her book as one of the best of its era. Others felt the same way. In 2013, Birkbeck College at the University of London staged the first academic conference on her: Invisible Circus: An International Conference on the work of Jennifer Egan.
The Goon Squad started with some adolescents creating a rock band and carried them far into their lives and the lives of people connected with them. In telling that story, Egan moved swiftly and surprisingly through time, describing events from the past, the present and the future in no predictable order. She’s explained that “I don’t experience time as linear. I experience it in layers that seem to coexist.” So that’s what she set down on paper. She’s acknowledged that reading Marcel Proust’s treatment of memory influenced her.
Even the title of that book starts out as a mystery. What’s a goon squad? Enforcers for organized crime were once called “goon squads,” so one of Egan’s characters says, “Time’s a goon.” Time manipulates all of us, changing us against our will, leading inevitably to our graves. Egan serves as literary goon squad. She lets a character flourish at a certain time, then shows the same character in difficulty a generation or two later, then perhaps moves the character backward again. Many important things happen between chapters but it is only dimly recalled, just as in life.
There are mysteries in Manhattan Beach, the new Egan novel, but this time readers easily understand them. Manhattan Beach is not at all like the Goon Squad except in the grace and precision of Egan’s prose. Manhattan Beach is a realistic story about a New York family that survives the Depression and lives through much of the Second World War. It’s a historical novel in the sense that it takes care to give brand names, describe clothing and cite historical events. The attack on Pearl Harbor, for instance, hangs over the action and a major character gets a routine job at the New York shipyard and discovers she’s helping to create a battleship, the USS Missouri.
At the beginning the 11-year-old Anna Kerrigan goes with her father Eddie on a visit to a wealthy man named Dexter Styles at his house in Manhattan Beach. Anna listens to Eddie and Styles, noting every word but understanding only a little. Eddie, a stockbroker who lost his job in the Depression, now works on the edge of organized crime. He’s a bagman delivering bribes for Dunellen, a friend from childhood and now a corrupt union boss.
Eddie hopes in vain that Dunellen will pay him a bonus so that he can order a new wheelchair for his other daughter, Lydia. A birth accident has left her severely disabled, unable to talk or look after herself. The nature of Anna and her mother are revealed by the tangled love and guilt they feel for Lydia. Eight years later Anna is working in the shipyard when she sees two men dressing a third in underwater equipment. Anna realizes that she wants to be a diver, one of the people who explore the underside of ships being built.
This desire seems destined to be thwarted by the man hiring the divers. He believes the strength of a female body isn’t equal to the demands of diving and Anna determines to prove him wrong. Like many women of her time, she faces the fact that those in control believe that her ambition is nothing less than outlandish. This is the moment when the novel feels most realistic.
Some of the reviews of this excellent novel have found it disappointing because it lacks the originality of the Goon Squad. I noticed one reviewer calling it “conventional,” a curse word in some literary circles. However, I’m of the mind that it may have taken more courage for Egan to write this traditional story than she needed for her more daring experiments.
No matter how much we admire Manhattan Beach, Egan fans will still believe that the PowerPoint presentation at the end of Goon Squad remains her most exquisite chapter. An adolescent girl, disturbed by certain tensions in her family, distils them into a deeply felt PowerPoint exposition, using a technique of business to solve a problem of family relations.
When I first read it, that passage struck me as one of the most brilliant short pieces of fiction I’ve ever come across. I still feel the same way and cherish in memory that first reading.
Jennifer Egan, one profile of her tells me, has known something about computers for many years. When she was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, she dated Steve Jobs, who installed a Macintosh computer in her bedroom.