She Covers The Waterfront: Eagle Q&A with Jennifer Egan on her new novel ‘Manhattan Beach’
I have been a major fan of Jennifer Egan’s writing since Easter Sunday 2010, when, on the train from Montreal to New York, I read her audacious and dizzying novel “The Keep” in one feverish sitting. By the time I arrived at Grand Central I felt like I was coming down from an acid trip.
Since then I have gobbled up in rapid succession the novels “Look at Me,” “The Invisible Circus,” “A Visit from the Goon Squad” and her masterful short story collection “Emerald City.” Egan’s narrative sleight-of-hand, vivid, compelling characters and edgy, distinctive voice floored me. She writes the sort of books that make you feel you have no choice but to read them. Dickens did that, as did Robert Louis Stevenson. And Hilary Mantel does it now. With this month’s publication of, “Manhattan Beach,” her first novel in seven years, Egan joins this august company.
“Manhattan Beach” is an old-fashioned page-turner that more than delivers on the foreboding promise of its “Treasure Island”-like opening set piece. Officially published earlier this month, the book has already been longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction. And deservedly so: The book is a Whitmanesque mosaic that truly does “embrace multitudes.” These multitudes include a post-“Studs Lonigan” Irish-American family that straddles shanty and lace curtain, silky gangsters and bankers who straddle respectability and thuggery, and Brooklyn Navy Yard female lathe operators, welders, machinists (and, in the case of the book’s protagonist Anna Kerrigan, the Yard’s first woman diver) who straddle prejudice and acceptance. For seasoning, also throw into the mix a couple of loogans (i.e., a loser and a hooligan), corrupt union local presidents and Italian-American mobsters and you’ll realize why Egan needs those 400-plus pages. She’s heeded Melville’s advice: “To produce a mighty book, chose a mighty theme.” And, in line with Egan’s longstanding fascination with all things aquatic, Melville also provides the book’s epigraph: “Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded forever.”
Obviously, the ideal place to have met Egan for an interview would have been the River Cafe. However, Walter’s in Fort Greene, though land-locked, proved more practical. At lunch, Egan and I talked about the origins of “Manhattan Beach”; her own Midwest (Chicago), West Coast (San Francisco), Ivy-League (University of Pennsylvania), Cambridge University (post-graduate studies), Manhattan/Brooklyn peregrinations; her take on critics and criticism; the limits of realism and a certain master of suspense.