Reading Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach
On the southern tip of Brooklyn is a neighbourhood by the sea popular in summertime for picnics on the beach and warm swims. In winter, it is simply a residential area where families scraped a living in the years during and after the Depression leading into the Second World War.
Jennifer Egan names her latest novel after the place her characters call home –Manhattan Beach.The Kerrigans are an Irish family whose luck peaks before the crash, and who must renegotiate life like millions of other Americans at the time. Their patriarch, Ed Kerrigan, hesitates every day before he re-enters the apartment where his family lives. Their circumstances are far from what he had envisioned for them once.
He’s devoted to his wife, Agnes, and his elder daughter, Anna. But his relationship with his youngest, Linda, is strained by her inability to walk, communicate or care for herself in any way. Agnes and Anna are devoted to Linda in a way that Ed isn’t able to muster. Self-aware of his revulsion towards his disabled daughter, he resolves to buy an expensive chair that will afford her new kinds of mobility and access to the world outside their apartment. He strikes a deal, witnessed by Anna, with a mobster called Dexter Styles. Shortly after, he disappears without explanation or trace.
Manhattan Beach is a fascinating portrait of the time, of the ways in which men banded in the Depression to make money in any way they could, and of the way possibilities for women opened up in the Second World War when the men were away fighting in the war (a theme visited in last year’s film, The Finest Hour, which you should watch if you haven’t already!). Anna grows up to work at the Naval Yard inspecting and measuring parts of military ships. Out with a colleague one night, she accidentally bumps into Dexter Styles at one of the nightclubs he owns. Without disclosing that she is Ed Kerrigan’s daughter, she allows herself to grow closer to him. Their relationship is one of the most compelling parts of the narrative. Anna herself isn’t sure whether she is drawn to him or whether she is simply trying to uncover how and why her father disappeared. It is a story of intertwined fates and all the characters have secrets. But it is principally a story about New York—a different kind of New York. We get a sense of this from Melville’s quote at the beginning of the book:
Yes, as everyone knows,
Meditation and water are wedded for ever.
The memorable parts of Manhattan Beach are the scenes that paint the sea as “an electric mix of attarction and dread”, and “an infinite hypnotic expanse”. For Dexter the sea is never the same on any two days. So combined with the social realism, there is the mystical presence of images of water– as powerful as the city’s tenements, subways and skyscarpers.
The novel does reveal the tenor of the times such as when Anna competes for a job as a diver who repairs war ships or when Agnes and Anna visit an expensive doctor who cannot cure Linda but who does allow them to feel temporarily better. However,what’s frustrating about the novel is that it pushes Dexter and Anna towards decisions that don’t correspond to what we know of their characters. Egan also imports two starkly different worlds – the Kerrigan women and the criminal network – without sufficiently patching them together. Anna’s family and her relationship with Dexter engaged me far more deeply than the sections on Dexter’s or Ed’s lives.
Finally, a more traditional novel than A Visit from the Goon Squad,Manhattan Beach was an enjoyable but uneven reading experience for me