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Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Manhattan Beach



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.
She finds her identity in her work, and Egan emphasizes how all the characters' identities are wrapped up in their work. We understand this, because for many, if not most, of us, our identities are our work. Much of the narrative focuses on the work, and we learn in detail the work of the diver, including all the mechanisms that go into the 1940's diving outfit.

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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