Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan (review)

Jennifer Egan's writing continues to reach depths that reveal worlds to us both familiar and new through her dexterous attention to the story and the words. Manhattan Beach begins during the Depression on the shores of New York where economics are hard and racketeering and corruption are thriving. At the start we meet the Kerrigan family of Eddie and Agnes and their children Anna and Lydia. Our focus is primarily on father Eddie and elder daughter Anna as they meet the suave mobster, perfectly named Dexter Styles. Then the novel jumps forward to focus on Anna's experiences at the Navy Yard during World War II where she breaks many gender barriers, including becoming a diver for the war effort. The book is solving the mystery of Eddie's disappearance in the space between these two key moments, but it also spends much of its time on Anna's trials of navigating the "appropriate" behavior for a young woman in regards to work, family, and relationships while continuing to ask these questions of "appropriate" behavior—or how to live in a life—for other characters, such as Eddie and Dexter in their own, and overlapping, milieux.

Yes, in many ways, this is purposefully a much more traditional book than Egan's experimental work in her sprawlingly powerful A Visit from the Goon Squad where the reader moves through a myriad of perspectives and approaches, and even journeys to the near future. That said, all of those hallmarks are still part of Egan's exceptional style, as is her strong use of taut dialogue. In each scene she gets the tone just right and leaves space for subtext. Her characters talk like people talk, with much left unspoken.

Although the time frame and character selection are more limited, this book develops in ways that make it difficult to call it just a historical novel as she smoothly transitions from an upper-class children's nursery to an old-school mobster canning vegetables. She also includes aspects of a variety of genres: a gangster noir, a feminist drama, a romance, and even a survival-at-sea story. And yet each element feels essential and flows into the next without a ripple, with the theme and the structure set out early for us by the young Anna:

Each time Anna moved from her father's world to her mother and Lydia's, she felt as if she'd shaken free of one life for a deeper one. And when she returned to her father, holding his hand as they ventured out into the city, it was her mother and Lydia she shook off, often forgetting them completely. Back and forth she went, deeper—deeper still—until it seemed there was no place further down she could go. But somehow there always was. She had never reached the bottom.

The metaphoric idea will soon tie in thematically to diving, to the danger of being thrown to "the fishes" in the underworld, and to the risky life of the Merchant Marines, but it is also about our experience of this deceptively simple work.

Throughout the novel we are entering and then shaking off these worlds. At the beginning, the world is very much like that depicted in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront, particularly when it details the lives of the longshoreman and the questionable Dunellen, the Union boss. For instance, Dunellen talks about boxers as, "Just beautiful. They're quick, they're smart, they listen. You should see them move, Ed." It reminds you of Rod Steiger's famous scene when his character nostalgically refers to the boxing fitness of Marlon Brando's character: "When you weighed 168 pounds, you were beautiful." She invokes our familiar understanding of this world, but because of her skill with language, she then expands each place to one that is all her own.

Egan's specificity with language allows you to trust everything she says. I have no idea if a common Depression-era drink was Genesee with a shot of rye, but her precision with such...