Egan’s ‘Manhattan Beach.’
For all the metafictional games being played in “The Keep” (2006) and the Pulitzer-winning “A Visit From the Goon Squad” (2010), even these novels display Jennifer Egan’s gifts as an oldfashioned storyteller who pays attention to character while spinning pageturning yarns.
Hence it’s no surprise to see this restless shape-shifter — each of whose four preceding novels tried something new — go old school in “Manhattan Beach,” featuring the sort of smart but constricted Victorian heroine one finds when reading George Eliot.
We first meet Anna Kerrigan at age 11 in 1934, during a trip to Brooklyn’s Manhattan Beach with her father. Eddie and Anna are visiting Dexter Styles, a well-heeled mobster who will shortly become Eddie’s boss. Three years later, Eddie disappears.
It’s the first of many mysteries in a novel where nothing and no one are quite what they seem — much like the sea that dominates this book, as a metaphor for our storm-tossed journey through life, on waters that hold far more than their surface reveals. Egan describes the sea as a “glittering curtain drawn over a mystery” that “touched every part of the world.” And as a place where “deeper things could come and go, but what broke the surface would be lodged in everyone’s memory.” It allows one to float free of gravity. But as we’ll later see in this novel, it’s also a titanic force that can rise up and kill.
Little wonder that Anna decides to become a diver, despite a Navy hierarchy that has no use for women in such dangerous roles. Strong-willed and determined, she wins the brass over and plumbs a darkness she’d never known, much as Egan gives us a tour of the darkness Anna hides within — all while cultivating an image as a good girl, “impervious to the vices around her.”
Egan’s novels include many similar young women, straying beyond conventional expectations and limitations while nevertheless feeling shame after breaking the rules. Trapped within a world they never made, their consequent rebellion leaves them spent and empty; repeatedly lying to escape expectations and fashion new selves, they often lose sight of who they are or were.
Along the way, we occasionally lose sight of Anna; hiding from those around her, she also hides from us. We don’t always know what makes her tick or why she chooses — often spontaneously and desperately — as she does. These narrative holes our deliberate; Egan won’t let her heroine be pinned down and classified. That, after all, is what others have been doing to Anna all her life.
She isn’t alone. While Anna’s experience is unique to her as a young woman in a highly moralistic society, Egan suggests parallels to the ways in which major characters like her father and Dexter, as well as minor characters like her aunt and her mother, are similarly trapped. She’s particularly good in suggesting how a family’s lovingly warm embrace can also smother and kill.
Egan covers this ground through a classically Victorian third-person narrator, channeling the thoughts of Eddie and Dexter as well as Anna while taking us around the globe in subplots featuring World War II at sea and power plays involving gangsters — all while occasionally moving back in time, through flashbacks telling us how Eddie and Dexter became who they are.
Those time bends are a modest variation on the dramatic temporal shifts in “Goon Squad”; they’re also true to Egan’s abiding sense — reflected in so much of her fiction — that ghosts from the past always linger, collapsing time while haunting us.
That’s one of the many ways in which “Manhattan Beach” reminds me of Sarah Waters’ magnificent “The Night Watch” (2006), another World War II novel that plays with time and features strong female characters trying to discover who they are. It’s telling, in this context, that “Manhattan Beach” ends with fog rolling in from the sea — hiding the lay of the land from view.