On Form in Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach

by Thomas Moore

Manhattan Beach is the latest novel from acclaimed writer Jennifer Egan. It is the story of Anna, a teenage girl staking out her independence, and Dexter Styles, a profiteer trying to turn over a new leaf. Anna and Dexter converge amidst a New York City undergoing major change, and though they navigate starkly different worlds, they are united by a common ghost. Deeply historical, Manhattan Beach achieves the most with its portrayal of a milieu in the throes of macroscopic phenomena such as the Great Depression or WWII. Egan’s characters are most intriguing as a function of their context.

In this manner, Egan’s book stakes out a place within contemporary literature. Manhattan Beach is driven by a fascination with context, albeit displaced, which it shares with its peers. It also will avail itself to those readers who seek to impose a political or social imperative -- Egan’s characters have a dynamism and layeredness (while still hitting nice moral notes) that suit them for the application of many an interpretative tradition. That said, Egan’s work is successful and unconventional in many ways, and should be evaluated in its own right.

Structurally, the novel harkens back to the realist novels of the nineteenth century. The story begins with a meeting between Styles and Eddie Kerrigan, Anna’s father. Kerrigan is seeking a change, and comes to Styles’s Manhattan Beach mansion with his daughter to court his favor, even though to do so is to betray his current employer and potentially compromise his position in the network of New York crooks and racketeers. Characters’ convergences serve throughout the novel to bring together agents whose personal dialectics, once integrated, drive the story forward. Encounters between characters drive the narrative, but Egan does not shy from games of perspective which privilege one character’s point of view: the close-third narration voice will invoke other characters resourcefully, making meaning from available emotional stock.

One might not expect Egan, considering her background, to write a research-based narrative with tinges of the social novel. The formal innovation of her last novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, was among the better received of a long tradition of postmodern prodding at and subverting the very conventions Manhattan Beach attempts to exemplify. This attempt is often carried to fruition with great success, and it is impossible to deny the potency of Egan’s prose. (Indeed, it is the distinctly contemporary lucidity of her prose that differentiates Manhattan Beach from previous entries in the realist tradition -- Egan has taken literary conventions in development since Flaubert and made them state-of-the-art: moreover, distinctly her own.) Egan has not, however, reinvented the wheel: many of the tropes which signalled to the modernists and postmodernists the corruption of the conventional narrative show their faces here. The persistent frustration of Manhattan Beach is to find Egan’s powerful voice disfigured, even momentarily, by old narrative sins: plot-driving serendipities; flaky exposition, toeing (or crossing) the line between world-building and showing off; profusions of unearned declaratives. Many (among them, those readers who are attracted to her competent and forgiving prose, but critics too) will be tempted to forgive Egan these, as they would so many others who, despite everything, have wrought the great, readable novels. Her inclusion on the National Book Award longlist is testament to this tendency (and to Egan’s deserved gravitas.) It bears reflection to ask whether those same concessions would be granted a more transgressive work -- or if they would have to be, in the first place.

In the wake of Manhattan Beach’s exclusion from the National Book Award shortlist, it is apparent that there are those who are not willing to cut the novel slack. This is in stark contrast both with Goon Squad’s Pulitzer and the success of the book that did win the NBA this year, Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward’s fantastical and language-driven ode to a shattered South. Egan’s deployment of carefully wrought conventions did not, for the NBA arbiters, measure up to Ward’s ambition and unflinching engagement with unconventional (and difficult) devices. In Ward’s work, conventional internal narrations are subject to reveries and rifts, intruding and invoked voices, and layers of exposition. The novel is written in dialect, and though it retains lucidity throughout, this choice signals a fixation with language per se that has been known to make readers most fluent in the English of the New York Times uncomfortable, or, at least, uninterested. Sing, Unburied, Sing! is dark and subversive. Ward’s prose lingers on human dysphoria and self-hatred with a rawness that is found amply (indeed, perhaps with greater economy) in Goon Squad but only gestured towards in Manhattan Beach. Only with the latter’s treatment of Eddie Kerrigan and his crippled daughter may there be known turmoil which even approximates that of, say, the delusions of Ward’s Leonie. That said, the scope of the novel -- with its three narrators, magical metaphysics, and backstory going back decades -- tends to obstruct the reader as much as it richens their experience.

Yet the triumph of an over-ambitious novel over a competent yet derivative novel (in the NBA’s) should perhaps not be surprising. The National Book Awards, after a failed experiment in the 80s with commercially appealing picks, have become famous for “famously esoteric short lists”, according to a 2011 Salon article by Laura Miller called “How the National Book Awards Made Themselves Irrelevant”. This criticism concerns the finalists’ niche-status commercially (of which Scribner-published Sing, Unburied, Sing, is not really an example) as much as their difficulty -- according to Miller, who would be echoed in a less critical New York Times article by Craig Fehrman, it is an award for “writers’ writers”. Ward’s novel bears comparison to one of Miller’s counterexamples: The Tiger’s Wife, by Tea Obreht, released in 2009 to commercial success and shortlisted in 2010 alongside “an assortment of low-profile and/or small-press offerings.” Both privilege the secondhand narratives of folklore and oral history alongside the immediacy of the present moment, highlighting the bearing inherited narratives have on modern life and subverting, if not undermining, the secular realism that has had its own day in the sun -- a case in point being Pulitzer-winning Goon Squad, which, despite formal innovation and speculative jaunts, is still very much a realist novel.

Egan should have a hard time finding much to complain about: her book received a front page spread on the New York Times Book Review and managed to snag a spot on both the Combined Print & E-Book and Hardcover Fiction bestseller lists, where she and Celeste Ng were in the literary minority among Stephen King, Dan Brown, and Stieg Larsson successor David Lagercrantz.