Dockside Candy

Magazine writer Jennifer Egan’s first fictional novel came out in 2010, “A visit from the Goon Squad, a bunch of interconnected short stories, which was rewarded with prizes.

In her latest book “Manhattan Beach” Egan describes Brooklyn’s rich maritime past, the East coast elite, social changes, America’s rise to postwar pre-eminence in the world and a Mafia-run nightclub making it a stimulating historical novel to read.  The story set in the 1930s and 1940s with some strategically placed flashbacks with a straightforward narration.

“The Sea, jubilant, elemental cry of a child released from a hot car on a summer day, but also to phrase with deep historical and literary roots.  Joy, purification, renewal, and death – the sea is of all these things in Manhattan Beach”, Jennifer Egan’s convolutedly veined visionary new thriller novel, with a wealth of detail about organised crime, the merchant marine and the clash of classes in New York.

Anna Kerrigan, the central figure, is 11 years old when we’re introduced to her in 1934, who was close to her father Eddie, working as a bagman for the Irish mob that runs Brooklyn docks. Eddie who is not all happy about the situation he finds himself in, as he is unable to love his severely disabled daughter Lydia, and indignant of his formerly glamorous wife Agnes’s absorption in caring for her. However, Eddie use to take Anna along on his trips to collect and distribute cash-stuffed brown envelops, and to the house of a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and family, all the time observing the uniformed servants, the lavishing of toys on the children, but these outings were stopped after a visit from Dexter Styles, a rich and charming man with covert jeopardy and a private beach behind his house. Three years later Eddie disappears, without even saying goodbye. By 1942 grown up Anna, now 19, who has developed an aptitude for mechanical engineering – is working at a tedious job in the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a member of the new female workforce created by the war, inspecting tiny ship parts with a micrometer.   She is the sole provider for her mother, a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career as a Ziegfield folly and her lovely, severely disabled sister.“ The truth had arrived gradually, like nightfall: a recognition, when she caught herself awaiting his return, that she’d waited days, then weeks, then months – and he’d still not come.” Eating lunch on the Piers one day, Anna catches her first glimpse of a diver descending from one of the barges and feel a seismic rearrangement within herself. Eddie is a distant memory until she’s brought into Dexter’s nightclub. She sees Dexter as an Italian Mafia figure who has a pseudo name after abandoning his unpronounceable real name and gone semi-legitimate by marrying into a protestant East Coast elite. Dexter is attracted to Anna, who does not tell him whose daughter she is. Anna, who wants to be a Navy diver, confronts a male establishment. Egan graphically describes the diving equipment in 1942, Children’ street games during the Great Depression, longshoremen’s unions and how to survive a shipwreck.

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan, Corsair £ 16.99/ Scribner $28, 448 pages