Anna's Sexual Freedom in Egan's Manhattan Beach

by Jonathan Heit 

In Jennifer Egan's latest, Manhattan Beach, protagonist, Anna, is the master of her own first sexual experience. As we sit in class, we try to recall just one predominantly pleasurable first sexual experience for a female character. Certainly not our most recent novel My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent. Maybe D.H Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow when a different Anna has a blissful sexual honeymoon with her newlywed in their bedroom. But even this experience is coupled with the inability to interact outside of the bedroom.

Egan’s Anna has a unique experience in modern literature. Her meetings with a boy in the dark of a carpet factory is refreshingly blunt. Beginning with the chance meeting of the two during a game played by children on the street, their sexual interactions progress as they continue to meet and experiment. These sexual escapades capture the giddiness of youth and the nonchalance of her femininity. Her body itself can hardly be seen in the darkness.  Egan doesn’t fall back on trauma to create her female protagonist’s sexuality. The experience itself was introduced as a memory midway through the book, before which I had perceived a certain innocence in Anna. I had taken a lack of narration of her own sexuality — partially created by a time gap, but more so stylistic choice — as a certain purity. If Anna were male, would I have assumed otherwise, that her sexlessness was gentlemanly?  Egan continues to play with the reader’s perception of Anna and the relationship between Anna’s non-normative femininity and the heteronormative environment of wartime America.

After a time jump in part two, the reader travels with 19-year-old Anna to the shipyard. During World War II, this oceanside city built ships and prepared them for deployment in the Navy. As so many left for the war, companies were left with fewer able bodied men to support a war time economy. A necessity for support in the war opened the gates for women to participate in the workplace.

Anna, strong and good with her hands, measures small maritime parts for uniformity. Feeling distanced from the war she sets her sights on diving — a task which requires from the workers training and some level of inherent abilities. This is where her femininity is most directly attacked. The physicality of the position turns wary, and even defiant eyes from colleagues, as her ability to perform is questioned. Her physical aptitude craving acceptance, or at least acknowledgement, from her male peers; all the while returning home nightly to her domestic duties, to bath and pamper Lydia, her disabled sister. Then, an extravagant and eloquently written scene at a nightclub allows these two worlds to converge.

Anna frolicks around in a champagne fueled trip across the dancefloor. Her partner in crime, Nell, accentuates the scene as they dance with suitors. Then, the sight of Dexter Styles, a gangster from her early childhood and a celebrity around town, draws her away from the Gatsby- esque club and to his dark corner across the room. Styles brings back lost memories and unanswered questions. Her desperate approach to converse is briskly answered by his goons, their aggressive tone contrasted by Dexter’s care.  He is intrigued by her strength and impressed by her forwardness as she introduces herself with her friend’s name to hide her identity and relation to her father.  Anna’s multifaceted sexual identity is not the only non-normative heterosexual character in this novel as the narrator shifts and follows Styles.

Egan’s ability to shift from one point of view to the next makes Manhattan Beach an exciting and easy read. I wanted to read on, but also felt like I could put the book down after one chapter and continue weeks later. While the convenience of certain chance encounters, like the one at the nightclub, seem unlikely in a realist take on the plot, she is altogether patient in the character development of the novel. This aspect of Egan’s writing may bother some, but I believe it actually allows for a more effective foreshadowing. It kept me reading for one as I waited for the “big moment”. It’s a dangerous move for Egan; building up so much tension for one scene, but she pulls it off by relying on her tantalizing prose and ability to create fantastical setting.