Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

Book Review

"He would die to stay alive, to savor the sensuous gallop of his thoughts toward some truth he hadn't yet perceived."


Manhattan Beach will be released in the UK on 3rd October 2017. It is written by Jennifer Egan and published by Corsair.

I'm still not sure how I feel about Manhattan Beach. It has a strange way of encroaching on you and, even though it's not a thrill a minute, you can't put it down. And yet, I felt that the story was a bit too meandering and had too many different directions, many of which came to nothing in the end.


BLURB

Manhattan Beach opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Anna observes the uniformed servants, the lavishing of toys on the children, and some secret pact between her father and Dexter Styles.

Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. She is the sole provider for her mother, a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career as a Ziegfield folly, and her lovely, severely disabled sister. At a night club, she chances to meet Styles, the man she visited with her father before he vanished, and she begins to understand the complexity of her father’s life.

Mesmerizing, hauntingly beautiful, with the pace and atmosphere of a noir thriller and a wealth of detail about organized crime, the merchant marine and the clash of classes in New York, Egan’s first historical novel is a masterpiece, a deft, startling, intimate exploration of a transformative moment in the lives of women and men, America, and the world.

I like a slow moving story, but Manhattan Beach seemed to have lots of offshoots that didn't really go anywhere. There were also characters that cropped up then disappeared again, seemingly without adding much to the main flow.

Egan's writing is lovely but I felt slightly detached most of the time, as though I was observing through a bubble, or, fittingly, through a diving suit. This is more evident in Eddie's narration, which seemed to have more of a removed feel than Anna and Dexter's.

I liked Anna, I empathised with a lot of what she was going through and her story shows how difficult it was, even in a time when women were being taken more seriously, to achieve her dreams. In fact, all the main characters felt very real. Even the slightly larger than life character of Dexter Styles, who could so easily have been a typical two-dimensional gangster, is given layers by Egan.

I like the story told from the three different narratives, this is a device that I usually enjoy as it allows the reader to see events from different perspectives and it's a good way to reveal plot twists and secrets. Sometimes the jumps in time were a little confusing though, espicially in Eddie's sections.

Manhattan Beach was easy to read, in that is is written beautifully, yet I felt the flow of the story wasn't quite right; some aspects which to me seemed big were skimmed over while other small events were lingered on. There were also some elements to the story that I found non-realistic. Not that Anna would become a female diver, it's unusual yes but there were women doing it, but smaller elements that seemed to be put in for convenience, or for plot devices which felt too ridiculous. One small example is when Anna manages to untie a complex knot while wearing a diving suit and gloves by closing her eyes and just feeling it. A little too convenient and felt a bit fairy tale-ish. There are larger examples but I can't reveal them without giving away spoilers.

Still, although I had issues with the story, I really enjoyed the backdrop of Manhattan Beach, war time New York, and learning about the underworld, the docks and the diving.

I've read a few reviews that says this book doesn't live up to Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad. I've not read any of her other work so can't compare, but she's obviously a very talented writer, I'd like to read more, to see if I get on better with one of her other novels.

My Review: 3/5

I received a copy of Manhattan Beach via NetGalley in return for an honest review. My thanks to the author and publisher.

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