On the waterfront | 12 October 2017

Much has been made of the American novelist Jennifer Egan’s mutation, in her latest novel, from purveyor of metafiction and fragmentary, experimental narratives to creator of a solid piece of traditional realism. Manhattan Beach tells the story of a father and daughter in New York in the years in and around the second world war: Eddie is a mobster’s bagman, who disappears without apparent trace early on; Anna is left distraught, but is also a resilient striver, growing up to become the only female diver in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard. Betwixt and between them stands Dexter Styles, a nightclub owner and instrument of the mafia, swishing between cold malfeasance and a yearning for a life less compromised.

But despite its appearance of solidity, Manhattan Beach shares with Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad and an earlier novel, The Keep, a vivid apprehension of the provisionality of human life and the onus on fiction to dispose itself accordingly in the attempt to capture it. Anna is a fan of Ellery Queen, eating up his tales of detection and suspense almost faster than the library can supply her. And yet she is aware of their shortcomings:

For all their varied and exotic settings, mystery novels seemed to happen in a single realm — a landscape vaguely familiar to Anna from long ago. Finishing one always left her disappointed, as if something about it had been wrong, an expectation unfulfilled.

That sense of nostalgia — a pull towards the half-remembered past that speaks of home — is one of the chimerical attributes of fiction that Egan seeks to probe and develop, and perhaps illuminates why she once described A Visit to the Goon Squad’s twin influences as Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu and the television mob show The Sopranos.