Cover Image: Manhattan Beach

Manhattan Beach

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I have never made it through a Jennifer Egan novel.

Until now.

I finished "Manhattan Beach" at about 2:30 am, being simply unable to put it down. I was captured from page one and I was completely in to the end.

It's a complicated story of complex relationships set between the late 1930s and the middle of World War II. At the opening of the book, Anna Kerrigan's father takes her along to visit a business associate who lives in a large house on Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn. Anna's family has been deeply affected by the Depression and her parents and severely handicapped sister Lydia live in a very modest apartment, so the large house and many toys belonging to the associate's children are memorable to her. This family will become as important to her as they obviously are to her father.

That's one storyline. Later, Anna is working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the war, and becomes entranced with the idea of becoming a diver, repairing ships beneath the water's surface. Her father has disappeared and her mother does piecework while staying home with Lydia. Women are doing lots of jobs during wartime, but not this one--yet.

And then, there is Dexter Styles, the man Anna and her father visit at the beginning of the novel. Although married into society, he is part of the shadow world of nightclubs and the mob. A man of subtlety and nuance as well as violence, he will fit into Anna's story in unexpected ways.

"Unexpected" is a word for many of the developments in "Manhattan Beach," and that is what makes the story so vivid. The way the characters face these events is so intriguing, so compelling, that the novel unnerves you again and again.

How nice that I have Jennifer Egan's other novels to revisit. I can only hope that one of them pulls me as much as "Manhattan Beach."

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This was such an interesting and wonderful story. The characters were fresh and the story was well played out. Very enjoyable.

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Jennifer Egan is an absolute wizard at portraying the contemporary, so I was a little disappointed that Manhattan Beach is just a perfectly fine historical novel. Egan has clearly done her research, and the changing mores of race, sex, and class in 1940’s New York is fun to read about. But many characters are introduced only to be abandoned, and the narrative loses momentum when it switches from Anna, who seems only tangentially connected to the underworld.

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Thanks Scribner and netgalley for this ARC.

A masterpiece of fiction. I loved the way this novel comes alive in the mind's eye. I wouldn't be surprised if this was made into a movie!

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What I was drawn to: The story centers on Anna Kerrigan, and her Irish family, beginning in Brooklyn during the Great Depression, an era and location that should come alive, so much rich history to drawn from.

So, what did and didn’t work for me? I was drawn into this story for very brief periods of time. When Anna was caring for her sister, whose disabilities require constant care and supervision, her devotion to her sister - admirable, and her delight when Lydia showed any positive reaction, charmingly sweet. When Anna’s father took her on a business related house call to a man who lived by the sea. When Anna was with her friend Nell, she came alive, again. When Anna fights her way through the negative view of women doing men’s work in her dreams to learn to dive, she shows her spirit and determination. However, there are also many situations where Anna’s just another character, lost and fading.

It wasn’t really that Anna was a more likable character than the others, it was a mixture of the episodic shuffle of time and place and person, which made the structure of this story feel very disjointed, and possibly even more for me was feeling as though there was a lot of ‘telling’ and not enough ‘showing,’ the writing, unnatural and stilted.

I was indifferent at least as much or more than I was interested. The writing is decent, but I did not find it to be above average or lovely. My interest diminished, my attention drifted. My frustration grew.

I am sure that there will be more than a sufficient number of readers who will love this novel. Perhaps I expected too much, but I know I wanted more.



Pub Date: 03 Oct 2017

Many thanks for the ARC provided by Scribner

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I thought the book was a great read! Read it in one sitting while at the ocean for vacation. This was the first book I have read by this author and look forward to reading more.

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Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan- A literary novel about people living through the Great Depression of the 1930's and on into World War II. Anna is a young girl grown up at first with wealth then poverty, who never lets these constraints hold her back. She goes to work at the New York Navel Yard and after a while fancies the idea of becoming a Navy diver, with the metal helmet and bulky suit. And so she does, to the amazement of everyone. Dexter Styles is an entrepreneur, a gamesman, an gangster. He has clawed his way to the top but belatedly realizes the top of society doesn't care for him, and nothing he does seems to salve his craving for respectability. Eddie Kerrigan, Anna's father, has dealings with Dexter, then disappears. It becomes Anna's quest to find out what happened to her father. Was he dead? Did he abandon his family. And while this is happening the whole country is caught up in the turmoil and changes brought on by World War II. The story shifts back and forth from person to person with a rich detail of emotions and discoveries. From a Pulitzer Prize winning author, this is one you shouldn't miss.

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The day with Tabatha and Mr. Styles became like one of those dreams that shreds and vanishes even as you try to gather it up.

The setting during the Great Depression, New York is initially the reason I wanted to read this novel. I think I was waiting for more excitement, because with everything happening during that time period a writer could do a lot with it. It seems for me it just fell flat at times. Anna’s diving experience was interesting but I had a hard time really falling for Anna as a character. Lydia, I have mixed feelings here because she sort of felt like a non-entity, I wanted her story to develop more. There was beauty in the love Anna and her mother felt for her, the care they gave her but I wondered why she left us so soon. In a time when ‘men ran the world’ certainly Anna comes into her own, shows strength and bravery. Historical fiction can be extremely difficult to tackle, particularly when you touch on gangsters. There are fantastic novels about organized crime so if you’re going to take that on, you have to know expectations will be high. Eddie’s story is important, and why he was involved in the criminal world matters but here I go complaining again- Lydia could have been such a solid driving force had she remained in the story. However, I did enjoy that she ‘comes’ to Anna during a big life decision. I think that is a beautiful moment.

I was hooked at first, Chapter One as Anna and her father Eddie are driving to Mr. Stlyes’s house stirred me. The comparison between his pampered child and the Flossie Flirt doll that Anna remembers wanting ‘violently’ beautifully shows the difference between their worlds, it also introduces the child that is still alive inside Anna as she is maturing into a young lady. Anna on the shore, wanting to feel the cold, a instinctual wildness, the strength in her had me thinking with the power of the ocean, her hunger for it is a great way to introduce a free spirit, someone that will not be tamed by her times. Then through the novel I thought ‘is this going for romance?’ because with Dexter it could have gone so much darker, richer. I am not sure if maybe there was too much so that nothing specific (aside from the Diving) was explored better or what? I felt confused, sort of thrown off the plot. I felt the beginning was such a strong start but then it veered off in too many directions and nowhere I wanted it to go. I don’t know if there was a fog of mystery for me that I cared enough about. I had to put the novel down for days at a time.

Eddie is a damaged but well written character, desperate to see his disabled daughter get the chair she needs but then, he makes terrible choices, he vanishes- I wonder what a different sort of novel it would be if he had stuck around with trouble on his heels. I think more than anything I am just left confused. The ending isn’t what I expected, it leaves me scratching my head. I don’t feel anything big happened, aside from Anna and her diving, the sexism, that women in the end run her world more than any man- but other than that I am not sure what I am taking from this. It isn’t that the writing is bad, it’s just the story drifts off all over the place so that I couldn’t invest in any character with my entire heart.

It may just be that I am not the right fit. Egan can certainly write, but I think the story just isn’t for me.

Publication Date: October 3, 2017

Scribner

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Not Egan's best, but a strong offering with an unusual plot.

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I adored Jennifer Egan's The Keep and A Visit from the Goon Squad and was very excited to score an advanced copy of her latest. Unfortunately, Manhattan Beach lacks the quirkiness and literary maneuverings of those two previous novels. Manhattan Beach is a straight forward novel of a father and daughter in and around Manhattan Beach beginning in 1934. Neither the plot, the setting nor the characters of this latest effort quite engaged me and I was longing for short-fiction feeling prose and strong characters of Goon Squad and the tense, building plot of The Keep.

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This is such a wonderful, beautiful novel! I'm knocked out by the way Jennifer Egan creates a harsh but beautiful world in this historical, literary work of fiction. I had been admiring Egan's careful research as I read, and it's lovely she included a section of acknowledgments on the pleasures of her research process at the end of the book, satisfying some of my curiosity about how she managed this beautiful novel. This is a work of fiction that stays with a reader forever. Thank you so much for sharing it with me, and I look forward to recommending it to many students and to many other readers after its publication.

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One of the rare novels which offers characters that were each developed with incredible detail, a plot that flows flawlessly though written in a non-linear fashion from varied perspectives, and the setting of an era that was magnificently researched, Egan delivered a masterpiece in Manhattan Beach. The story was character driven, and although the main protagonist, Anna, is the central focus, the secondary characters were equally as deliberate in propelling the plot. There was no excess in words, no frivolous passages of time, each chapter was necessary. There is no question that this novel will be regarded as one of the best of the year, I'm confident.

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Egan's latest is eagerly awaited--it's her first since A Visit From the Goon Squad won the Pulitzer-- is, maybe surprisingly, a fairly straightforward historical novel. Still, it is a really EXCELLENT historical novel! It centers on a young woman growing up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, her relationship with her father (shades of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn there), and what happens after he disappears--and what happens years later when she encounters the mysterious man she met with her father one day. And meanwhile, its WWII, and she gets a job at the Navy Yard to support her mother and disabled sister, and everything about her job was really fascinating! Anyway this is perhaps not a literary groundbreaker, but it is immensely satisfying, and sometimes that is just as good. A/A-.

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I haven’t read any of Jennifer Egan’s other novels but they get so much praise that I was thrilled to get this eARC but ultimately I was underwhelmed. The story revolves around Anna who, for the majority of the novel, is working in the Manhattan Navy Yards during the Second World War, contributing to the war industry as so many women did when men were called to fight. Despite the desperate need for labour and the necessity of shifting perspectives with regards to women's work she faces the casual (and not so casual) sexism of male workers, particularly when the sight of a navy diver takes possession of her imagination and she determines to become one of the only female Navy divers. Alongside Anna-as-adult we are introduced to an earlier world of Depression-era hardship and corruption as she accompanies her father Eddie on mysterious visits to powerful, and often much richer, men. Eddie is clearly mixed up in something shady which culminates in his sudden, an unexplained disappearance. He becomes an absence haunting his daughter's life.

It is this dual narrative which destabilised the novel, while Anna's has some truly original and gripping aspects (the diving scenes in particular are beautifully written, tense and claustrophobic, Anna's anxiety, excitement and wonder contagious. The pace stalled whenever the narrative switched to Eddie and the murky but rather dull world of union corruption and organised crime. This world is more familiar than Anna's and more prone to cliche and predictability. The players are obvious, they don't do or say anything unexpected and feel like stock characters. In particular the early stage at which Eddie's fate is revealed removes a primary source of anticipation, it would have been better if the reader could have remained in the dark with Anna.

While Anna's character, and those around her, are superior to those in Eddie's narrative there are weaknesses there too. In the early chapters we are introduced to Anna's severely disabled sister Lydia. The ways that the family, and other characters, responded to Lydia were some of the most interesting and insightful passages, ranging from adoration to frustration to disgust and there was often love in all of them. Lydia's need for a special chair costing hundreds is one of the driving forces behind Eddie's backroom negotiations and his relationship with with the wealthy enigmatic Dexter Styles which ultimately leads to his uncertain fate. Despite this Lydia, and all the potential for further exploration of her circumstances, disappears not far into the story. In many ways Anna herself would be at home amongst the heroines written by Sarah Waters and Sarah Moss; brave, determined, independent, rebelling against social and gender norms, and yet alongside them she would be a little gauzy and insubstantial, a cipher to their convincing reality and full personhood. In the same way, despite impressive and meticulous research, Egan’s historical world lacks the immersive power of Moss or Waters, it is detailed and three-dimensional but truly lives only in fits and starts.

A narrative that focused more exclusively on Anna would have allowed for a more consistent pace a well as better development of her and her colleagues and the specific world in which they worked and lived. The shadow of Eddie's disappearance and the revelation of the events surrounding it could have added the shady dimension Egan was aiming form without having to delve quite so deeply into it or deviate so often from Anna's perspective.

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I don't always love historical fiction but this novel hooked me from the beginning as its unique characters were believable and attention to detail was flawless. Spanning years from the Great Depression to WWI, it relates the story of Anna and her family, their successes and failures, their dreams and accomplishments. It's like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn meets the twenty-first century as it addresses feminism, racism, organized crime, bootlegging, and social issues that bring the era to life. Another winner for this author!

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I fear that hardcore Jennifer Egan fans may be disappointed by this novel, her first foray into historical fiction. And while I was not as taken with this book as I was with Good Squad, Look at Me, or Invisible Circus, I truly admire how Egan stretches herself by trying something new, and when I finished the book I immediately wanted to read it again. The plot involves organized crime in pre-WWII New York, and extends into the home front during the war--particularly the workers who learned to dive in order to work on warships. Egan's research is extensive and her characters thoughtfully drawn.

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Manhattan Beach written by Jennifer Egan

This is a hard review for me to write, because while it is apparent in the acknowledgements Jennifer Egan lists the many people she interviewed and the many books she read to meticulously research and bring this book to life, it was a disappointing experience. I have tremendous respect for this Pulitzer Prize winning author whose historical novel Manhattan Beach will most likely find an audience of fans for this book. I found this book to be the most engaging when Anna's character was learning how to dive underwater in her 200 pound gear to make repairs at the Brooklyn Naval shipyard. I was invested in Anna's character and whether she was taking care of her disabled sister Lydia or her excursion's with her friend Nell or any interactions Anna had I was engaged.

I don't think this particular book was a good fit for me because I didn't feel comfortable with the writing style of this novel. My attention waned quickly when the author would switch back and forth between ganster Dexter Style's family life and his underworld business dealings with Anna's father Eddie Kerrigan. The Eddie Kerrigan and Dexter Styles story arc did not interest me at all. It did not seem fresh or new. I have been bombarded with the crooked labor union's and organized crime in New York City during the years of prohibition and the years that followed it. I became completely disinterested and disengaged as a reader when the narrative went in that direction.

I really wanted to like this story but as I said I have read an abundance of this type of genre and it lost me as a reader. I felt the writing to be disjointed. I felt so bored at times that finishing this was a challenge. It could be that I am in the minority of reader's that feel this way. I do hope this book succeeds and am grateful to Net Galley, Jennifer Egan and Scribner for providing me with my digital copy in exchange for a fair and honest review.

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I thought I had read Egan before and remembered good things, but after starting *Manhattan Beach*, it wasn't clear to me that I had the correct Jennifer. I was only able to stick with the book for the first couple of chapters. The tone was strange to me; perhaps the characters are meant to be jaded in some way after living the difficult lives put before them. Anna seemed innocent at least, but the adults were so dysfunctional, I didn't think I could go through with it. The relationship between Anna and Mr. Styles seemed like it would be heading into dangerous territory as well.

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I liked this one a lot but got bogged down in Eddie's storyline, which appeared in the second half of the book. Anna's story was much more complete and compelling. For fans of historical fiction.

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I really enjoyed this story, it is set in Brooklyn mostly around the naval yard. I know this are but never realised who much the yard was used during WW2. Throw in a missing father and some local gangsters and this book is both interesting and enjoyable.

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