Review: "Manhattan Beach"

I’ve only read one other novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan. But my love for that book had me certain I would love the much-hyped Manhattan Beach.

After A Visit from the Goon Squad, which zoomed in on tight little stories loosely interconnected, Egan took on a story with a sweeping narrative arc, almost an epic, in Manhattan Beach. Indeed, there are hints of an Odyssey peppered throughout, as protagonist Anna’s seafaring father makes his haphazard way—both physically and mentally—back to his Penelope-like daughter, the queen of his heart, who is assailed and aroused alike both by the trials of daily life and by the ghosts of her father’s past.

This was a very different read than A Visit from the Goon Squad; I almost forgot, several times, that they were part of the same author’s canon. And while I loved the character studies and narrative voices with which Egan experimented in the former, I found that these same characteristics fell somewhat flat in Manhattan Beach.

Egan sets up the novel—and sets it up quite well—as a thriller. The book begins when Anna, the protagonist and central character, is a child. She visits a wealthy family on the titular beach with her father Eddie, and we, like Anna, don’t quite know why they are there. Endowed with questions and adult sensibility—and allowed glimpses into Eddie’s psyche by the third-person narrator—we become relatively confident that the nature of Eddie’s meeting with the wealthy man, Dexter Styles, may not be completely savory. It may not, in fact, even be completely legal. We shiver delightedly—is it from the description of the cold winter beach, or form the promise of intrigue? Who knows?

From the mysterious shores of 1930s Manhattan Beach, we jump several years forward, to 1942. Anna is 19 and working as a parts-measurer for the war effort at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Her father has disappeared five years earlier, and Anna and her mother are left alone with Lydia, Anna’s physically and mentally disabled younger sister, who requires constant care. Anna fiercely loves her sister and has, she would have us (and her mother, and herself) believe, stopped wondering about what happened to her father.

Bored by her repetitive job, Anna sets out to become the first female diver at the Navy Yard. As she and we learn more about the technical tactics of diving, and as Anna proves that she is a natural underwater, she dives simultaneously deeper into her family’s mystery. As she reconnects—coincidentally, at first, and then, repeatedly, on purpose—with Dexter Styles, Anna learns that her understanding of her father only ever skimmed his surface. Egan paces the narration perfectly—we readers wade through the dark toward what we hope is the light of knowledge, and Egan dangles the lifeline that promises a pull to air in front of us, just out of reach, for pages upon pages.

The read feels thrilling until it doesn’t. The climax comes too quickly, with too neat and incomplete an explanation, and it doesn’t do justice to the foundation Egan has laid. There are so many characters in Manhattan Beach, Anna included, who I am certain have more depth than we can discern in the story. I was left wondering why certain characters existed and feeling that the intrigue I had imagined would have been more interesting than what actually happened. The final twist of the book is predictable, and we don’t even get to see how Anna changes or grows upon its outcome (this is cryptic, I realize, but I don’t want to spoil it!).

This is not to say that I didn’t like Manhattan Beach, or that it wasn’t well-written, or that it’s not worth reading. It is! And perhaps you will feel satisfied with the outcome of the mystery and with each character’s development, whereas I felt that there were still depths to be explored for each one.

Rating: 4/5

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