by Jennifer Egan
Scribner 2017
448 pages Historical Fiction
Wow! I just wrote "historical fiction" for a book in
which much of the plot happened during my lifetime. That was a rude awakening!
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan is a New York story, but not
the kind of New York story that we are used to reading. It is an extremely
well-researched novel based at the harbor and navy yard in Brooklyn in the
1930s and then, again, during World War II. (Just for clarification sake, I
wasn't alive during the 1930s, but I was born during WW II.)
There are three main characters, with others on the
periphery. The primary character, Anna Kerrigan grows up during this time
frame. Her father, Ed Kerrigan, appears, disappears, and then reappears in her
life. Dexter Sykes, a wealthy nightclub owner with mob connections, plays a
pivotal role in the Kerrigans' lives. They all appear together in the book's
first scene, on a wintry day on Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn when Anna is 11
and her father has business with Sykes. While other characters have influence
in the plot, the book is not about them. Although you don't connect the dots
right away, the pivotal scenes happen in Dexter Sykes boathouse at his
beachfront home on Manhattan Beach.
Anna grows up before our eyes. As happened to many young
women coming of age during the war years, she gets an industrial job at the
boatyard. She counts and packages parts for the warships that are being
constructed at the naval yard, but what she really wants to do is to be a naval
diver. Through the help of her boss, she has a successful tryout with a diving
company, and because many of the former divers have joined the navy, she gets a
job working underwater on ships being repaired.
Family relationships are relatively meaningless to the plot
of Manhattan Beach. Family members wander in and out of the plotline, because
family is not the story that Egan wants to tell. Ed Kerrigan's reaction to his
multiply-handicapped younger daughter is extremely complicated, and he can't
deal with his emotional reaction to her. When the daughter dies, Anna's mother
leaves Anna on her own in the city and moves back to her family in Minnesota. When
her mother leaves, she thinks of Anna: "It was hard to imagine her lonely;
she was so self-contained." She hugs her fiercely "trying through
sheer force to open the folded part of Anna, so deeply recessed." Dexter
Sykes barely knows his wife and children, so caught up he is with his work.
Anna's aunt, a minor character, returns to prominence in Anna's life at the end
of the novel as Anna deftly solves the major secret in her life.
Another prominent aspect of the novel concerns the secrets
that people keep. More than once, a character says to another: "We will
never speak of this again." Here is another example of text about keeping
secrets. Anna is thinking of her work friend Nell. "Nell was not a good
girl. Her secrets weren't for Anna to know, and this made her feel easy in
Nell's presence—released from a scaffolding of pretense she'd been unaware of
maintaining with other girls." We also realize that it is the secrets we
keep that hold us back, and only when we release the secret are we able to move
forward. Anna's secret is potentially devastating and crippling, but she and
her aunt solve it in a forward-moving, life affirming way.
The sea is central to everything that happens in the novel—from
Anna's career as a diver, her father's second career as a seaman, to Dexter
Sykes' boathouse. "Eddie had never noticed how much of his own speech
derived from the sea, from 'keeled over' to 'learning the ropes' to 'catching
the drift' to 'freeloader' to 'gripe' to 'brace up' to 'taken aback' to
'leeway' to 'low profile' to 'the bitter end' or the very last link on a
chain." The naval yards and the bars and restaurants that surround the
docks are areas that we have seen in novels of other cities, but seldom seen in
a novel about New York. At the end of the book, Egan discusses her research and
the amount of time she spent learning about the war, boats, naval yards, and
diving. It is impressive.
Egan won a Pulitzer Prize for her quirky and innovative
novel, A
Visit from the Goon Squad, which
I adored, but I was not expecting to read a similar novel when I picked up Manhattan
Beach. because I had read that she had returned to a more conventional
novel format. At the same time, I can report that the novel is powerful and
effective, a classic in structure and subject. Both reviews in the New York Times are immensely
complementary. One
reviewer called it "a dreadnought of a World War II-era historical
novel, bristling with armaments yet intimate in tone." He calls Egan a
"witty and sophisticated writer." A review was also on the front page
of the Times Book Review. That
reviewer says that "this is a novel that deserves to join the canon of
New York stories."
I also read a great Egan interview in The Wall Street Journal. Here's what
I love the most about this novel. By returning to a classic genre, Jennifer
Egan has again been innovative. What will she do next?
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