Manhattan Beach 
by Jennifer Egan.
Corsair, 448 pp., £16.99, October 2017, 978 1 4721 5087 5
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Many reviewers​ of Jennifer Egan’s new novel Manhattan Beach have found the book ‘surprising’ for being straightforward and conventional. Her previous and best-known book, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), was lauded for being formally inventive. Each of its 13 chapters is different: one chapter is a footnoted celebrity profile written by a journalist in prison for sexually assaulting said celebrity; another is a series of PowerPoint slides created by a 12-year-old about music (they’re about pauses in great rock’n’roll songs) and her family. The novel, which won a Pulitzer, secured Egan’s reputation as an astute analyst of the present, the recent past and even the near future – it ranges from 1979 to the 2020s. It also guaranteed that her next book, whatever it was, would be widely reviewed. It’s within that structure of inevitability and obligation that reviewers call Manhattan Beach ‘surprising’.

The idea that Manhattan Beach is a radical departure for Egan – or, rather, a departure that is radical in being conservative – depends on not looking back very far. She is a ‘refreshingly unclassifiable novelist’ (New York Times on The Keep), which makes it all the sillier to suggest that her latest is remarkable for its unexpectedness. She does have certain durable concerns: the American obsessions with technology and image, the ways history shapes our longings, and nostalgia. Her first novel, The Invisible Circus (1995), is a coming-of-age story set in San Francisco and Western Europe in 1978 that examines the legacy of the 1960s. Look at Me (2001), a fragmented novel featuring a model with a surgically reconstructed face, is, among other things, a satire of the fashion world and dotcom mania. The Keep (2006), a neo-gothic tale written by a prisoner for a fiction workshop (though the novel exceeds that frame), centres on a broke New York scenester at a castle in Eastern Europe which is being converted into a kind of digital detox resort. ‘It can be hard to say what kind of novelist she is,’ Alexandra Schwartz wrote in a recent New Yorker profile. ‘She is a realist with a speculative bent of mind, a writer of postmodern inclinations with the instincts of an old-fashioned entertainer.’

It’s easy, however, to say what kind of novel Manhattan Beach is: a historical novel. In its opening chapter, set in 1934 in Brooklyn, 11-year-old Anna Kerrigan accompanies her father, Eddie, a union man yearning for a change, on a visit to the mysterious Dexter Styles, who lives in a mansion on Manhattan Beach, next to Coney Island. By the fifth chapter, we are in 1942. Eddie has vanished and Anna, now 19, is working in the Brooklyn Navy Yard – first inspecting ship parts, then as the only female diver, performing underwater repairs on battleships – to support her mother, Agnes, and her severely disabled sister, Lydia. When Anna runs into Dexter at one of the nightclubs he owns (he’s a racketeer, it turns out), she remembers meeting him as a child and senses that he may know the answer to a question she has long suppressed: what happened to her father? (Was he offed by the mob, or did he simply run away, fed up with his bad luck and stifling home life?) The rest of the book mostly follows Anna in her quest, sometimes shifting to Dexter’s and Eddie’s past lives and current predicaments.

Manhattan Beach feels different from Egan’s other books in its studiedness. While the others may have been well researched (Egan didn’t know anything about the music industry before starting Goon Squad), they don’t smell of the lamp. In writing a historical novel about organised labour, organised crime and the war, Egan has taken on two challenges: to document the past without being boring or hokey, and to reveal something new about a period whose mythologies and aesthetics still have meaning to us. These challenges are, in a sense, at odds with each other: as Boardwalk Empire and Mad Men have shown, creating a plausible, interesting world depends on embracing the accepted mythologies and aesthetics of the time – indeed, on aestheticising the mythologies (mid-century sexism sure looks sexy smoking) and mythologising the aesthetics (everything was just so).

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