Analysis: Manhattan Beach: By Jennifer Egan, Anna Kerrigan, the First Female Diver at the Brooklyn Naval Yard During World War II, Meets with a Man Who Helps

Manhattan Beach Novel By Jennifer Egan Jennifer Egan conquered the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011; it was a flamboyant novel with an innovative structure. Her writing A Visit From the Goon Squad consisted of 13 chapters, Each from a different point of view. All at a different and non-sequential point in a 40-year span of time, each one leading to the next in an implacable result. From the kleptomaniac to his mentor to her boss to his lover to her boyfriend to his bandmate who is also the boss in chapter two to his wife, and on and on and on. One of the sections is a PowerPoint presentation. Egan's new fiction, Manhattan Beach, is not showy or experimental. It's a historical best-seller, one that skips through time a bit but in an entirely accessible way. It's nearly shocking, even daring: after exhibiting the marvelous and exciting things she can do with structure, she sat down to write a candid conventional novel. How else could she surprise us now? Manhattan Beach is franker than Goon Squad but just as wise Principally, Manhattan Beach regards Anna, who as a child during the Depression reveres her father, Eddie, and is only half aware that he is making money by working as a courier for different criminal gangs. Eddie, meanwhile, adores Anna, but he can't make himself love his younger daughter Lydia, who cannot sit upright unassisted or speak coherently. Lydia is, Eddie notes, beautiful, but her helplessness disturbs him, and he begrudges her for taking his wife and older daughter's concentration away from him. Eddie disappears when Anna is an adolescent, and she grows to hate him: how could he leave her and her mother and her disabled sister? How can they all persevere? When World War II starts, she takes a post in the shipyards. She works her way up to a diver. And slowly, she begins to absorb more and more time with one of her father's old business colleagues, the one who used to describe to both Anna and Eddie the life of prosperity and comfort that they should have had, and who offers Anna the possibility of a dangerous kind of fatherly approval. But don't be fooled by the candid plotting: Manhattan Beach is nevertheless vintage Egan. While it might not have the ostentatious setup that A Visit From the Goon Squad did, it's concerned with the same central question: How is it conceivable to live in the world, knowing that time, the eponymous goon of Visit, is going to have its behavior with all of us, eventually? That we will grow old and die, and that all that will come after we've dedicated our lives to other people, expecting for them to become old and die too? "The youngsters of my youth are fat, balding, and in some cases dead," Anna's mother relates in a letter. "I look at my appearance and see no real difference; I am kidding myself!" "I cannot endure this," Eddie reasons of his life, "I will not be made happy by this." He is desperate for a difference, or at least for time to stop moving long enough for him to discover a way to make a difference before it is all too late and his presence is over. Anna, meantime, longs for social advancement, for it to be possible for her to dive without criticism, or to live alone if she wishes to, but she finds any adjustment to her personal life horrifying. Her father's abandonment is a huge betrayal because it uproots her life so entirely; in the outcome, she clings to Lydia as "a last still point amid so much wrenching transformation." The only opportunity for redemption lies in the sea, which in Manhattan Beach is a place of epiphany and tremendous potential, pitiless and firm and revelatory. Diving to the ocean floor, Anna encounters "a burst of delight" at her newfound weightlessness, "This was like flying, like charm, like being in a dream," but also an "eerie disturbance, as if she were sliding toward oblivion, or floating in a void."