Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

A wide-ranging, comprehensive historical story of a working class family, set in Brooklyn, New York, in the context of WW2, this book encompasses the social impact of the war on an American population recovering from the Depression, but still characterised by traditional norms of family, hard work, and women who aspired to comfortable, invisible marriage – the only alternative being the ostracism and isolation of single poverty.

The Kerrigan family lives in working-class Brooklyn, on the sixth floor of a typical tenement building: cramped, no lifts, all the neighbours known to one another. We know by the end of the first chapter that they are not quite the everyday family; Anna is the elder of 2 daughters, and the constant companion of her father Eddie, who takes her with him on visits to deliver ‘notes and packages’ to his Union colleagues. The younger daughter, Liddy, is profoundly disabled, cared for at home with boundless love and attention by Anna and her mother –but, it soon appears, an object of guilt and rejection by Eddie, who cannot accept her condition and despite loving his wife and being a ‘good provider’, spends little time at home.

When Anna goes with her father for a mysterious visit (in reality a recruitment test) to Ed Styles, shady nightclub owner and devoted family man, two elements of the story are established: Eddie is a bagman for the Syndicate, and Anna has a passion for the nearby beach which continues into her adulthood.

The story quite abruptly jumps forward about 10 years, to rejoin adult Anna and her adult companions, all women recruited to ‘war work’ in a Naval assembly factory in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Anna is quickly seen to be a rebel who defies the rule about eating lunch in the building with the boring ‘marrieds’, and spends her lunch breaks exploring the docks and befriending the wild and beautiful Nell.

 Eddie has disappeared years since, without any farewell or obvious reason, and is presumed dead. Anna and her mother continue to care for Liddy with devotion but without hope.

Anna’s restless boredom and love of the sea crystallise when she sees Navy divers training on the docks, and, helped by the war-related scarcity of male recruits, she manages to get a trial with the divers. We realise the entrenched misogyny of the time through her excruciating humiliation by the officer in charge, and feel her exhaustion and inner toughness as she prevails to become an accomplished diver.

Meanwhile, Anna is introduced to nightclub life by Nell, and meets Ed Styles – she recognises him while he of course does not recognise her as the child of the beach, and she gives him a false name.

 The wild and illicit affair that ensues consumes both of them, and is one of the best-written descriptions of sexual abandon that I have read. The story becomes more intense and involving as it moves through the diving dramas, the death of Liddy, the mother’s search for new meaning away from New York and Anna’s increased freedom and independence.

The fate of Ed Styles, the consequences of the affair, and sudden news about Eddie, keep the story fascinating, a real page-turner that continually reminds us of the historical setting of the war, the social environment, and mainly, for me, believable characters whose lives I cared about.

The only parts that I considered over-written and tedious, and tempted me to skip pages, were a couple of the diving sequences – enough already! Overall, I loved the book, with its depiction of the period and the constant presence of the ocean and the centrality of the docks and shipping  to the growth of New York.

Review by Helen