Review: Manhattan Beach

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Reading this makes me think of those times when I see a hip-hop star invited on some TV show to sing in a traditional manner, maybe, for instance, for the national anthem. Some of them are good at it; we get to hear someone best known for rapping come out with a passable Nat “King” Cole. In general, though, it’s disappointing. These are people talented in a particular way – they’ve found ways to work with rhythm that transform “ordinary” song – but they seem more or less ordinary when they sing in a conventional, traditional way.

In A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan played with rhythm in memorable ways. I suppose I liked the novel a little less than many people – in the end I preferred what Colum McCann, Rachel Kushner, and Joan Silber are doing in the same vein – but I still thought it was memorable and impressive. She found a way to interrogate a moment, to trace the spider-web of linkages among people who aren’t entirely aware of one another. (My name for it the “rhizomatic novel.”) It was good stuff and cutting edge. It was to the conventional novel, to complete the metaphor, like hip-hop is to Motown.

Manhattan Beach, though, turns out to be Motown. You’re not going to find more people inclined toward the material of this novel – it’s all about gangsters and night clubs in the 1930s and then the 1950s – but it’s conventional in a way that I can’t help but find disappointing. Egan is not without talent, but this is not where her talent shines best. She’s good at disrupting the rhythm of narrative. While there are some impressive moments of chronological suturing here, it’s ultimately a novel bound by its own sequence and limited by characters defined by events rather than interiority.

I guess I have to reveal some SPOILERS to get any more specific. Anna is a dynamic little girl whose father, a charismatic man who’s risen in the longshoreman’s union as a bagman – a position he took because he needed money to care for his other physically and mentally challenged daughter – and come increasingly under the spell of gangster Dexter Styles. There’s a dash of Gatsby to it all, but the heart of the novel takes place half a generation later when Anna is a young adult and insists she can crack the all-male cohort of WWII home-front divers involved in repairing various ships for the military.

SPOILER CONTINUED: The actual story is larded with melodrama. Anna overcomes male chauvinism as she becomes a diver. Her father has disappeared, apparently murdered by Dexter. She starts an affair with Dexter and, on getting pregnant, finds sisterly support from a handful of differently emancipated women. And, then – ULTIMATE SPOILER – we learn her beloved father isn’t dead but that he fled years before because of the conflicting pressures of the gangster world and caring for his disabled daughter.

That’s a plot worthy of a Victorian novel, meaning that this is, if you allow for a change in context and time, a novel in conventional form. Unlike A Visit from the Good Squad, this one takes its power from what happens rather than from the thoughtful and creative way it’s organized. This is a novel that depends on its characters and their growth – in a traditional fashion – and, bottom line, that convention keeps it from turning into anything so memorable.

I can well imagine why Egan chose to write this as she did. It’s ambitious and sprawling. It’s likely the sort of novel she imagined writing when she was – as so many of us were – that adolescent curled up with a fat book and imagining her name on its spine.

As this has emerged, though, it seems both too safe and too self-contained to be that memorable or, really, that good. I’ll give Egan’s next one a chance, but I hope she finds her way back to what first brought her attention. She’s belongs to literature’s hip-hop age more than to its classical one.


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