A beautiful novel of reinvention

A work of remarkable cinematic scope, Manhattan Beach portrays the lives of an Irish family in Brooklyn, set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and then the second world war. A young woman becomes a diver to help the war effort and uncovers the powerful forces that led to her beloved father’s disappearance; a father is forced to leave his family behind to save his own life; and a successful mobster gets swept up in cultural tides that threaten everything he’s built.
As a novelist, Egan possesses an unusual mix of qualities, combining a powerful social realism with poetic resonances that derive from her precise imagery and her fascination with the limitations of language. Here, she places her characters in situations that permit trenchant cultural observations, writing revealingly about the challenges of coming of age in the middle of the American century, when women’s lives were substantially circumscribed. But this novel is also metaphysical in nature: Egan’s characters are transformed by the vast ocean around them, which both hides and reveals.
Egan’s decision to withhold crucial scenes until late on ends up feeling disappointing, even if one can appreciate the reasons for her doing so. It’s in the later sections that we meet Eddie once more, now a third mate on a cargo ship, the Elizabeth Seaman. We learn what happened all those years ago as we follow him in his own role in the war effort, but at this late stage the narrative feels less urgent than expository.

This may be a weakness of Manhattan Beach, but it comes from an admirable attempt to deploy narrative as a tool to enact – to mimic – the disruptions we experience in real life. This is a novel that will pull you in and under and carry you away on its rip tides. In particular, Anna’s plight as a woman whose will is larger than her circumstances is dramatized with tremendous power. Its resonances continue to wash over the reader long after the novel ends.