Proof of what he’d always believed: men’s children gave them away. Dexter thinks, “The toughness he’d sensed coiled in Ed Kerrigan had flowered into magnificence in the dark-eyed daughter. The scene bonds Dexter to Eddie and Anna in ways that will be fateful for all three. The child putting her feet in the water becomes a key to the novel’s entire plot. But veering into the past, she applies a surfeit of artifice in Manhattan Beach that erases the authenticity effects she intends.

Egan has a reputation as an authentic chronicler of the present - “the impersonal tyranny of a mass, technicised society,” in Pankaj Mishra’s phrase. Manhattan Beach is a turn to historical fiction, which isn’t uncommon for a novelist in mid-career. Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 book A Visit From the Goon Squad, a novel structured out of a cycle of stories on the theme that aging is a drag, especially for rock musicians. (And why would the sensation go to her heart, rather than the spine or the brain? Perhaps it’s because she’s all heart.) There’s a straining here to impart meaning to experiences that are universally familiar and obvious. That sentence is at once overwritten (“agony of sensation,” “flame of ache”) and underwritten (“unexpectedly pleasant”), which is typical of Egan’s style throughout the novel. By the water, Anna takes off her shoes and stockings and dips “her white, bony, long-for-her-age feet in the icy water”: “Each foot delivered an agony of sensation to her heart, one part of which was a flame of ache that felt unexpectedly pleasant.” Dexter lives in a big house with a private beach. It’s four days before Christmas 1934, and as we’re reminded several times, it’s cold outside. A mob bagman, Eddie Kerrigan, has brought his 12-year-old daughter Anna to visit an underworld higher-up, Dexter Styles, who’s interested in hiring Eddie as an “ombudsman” for his gambling operations. Jennifer Egan’s new novel Manhattan Beach begins with a portentous scene on the bit of Brooklyn that juts to the east of Brighton Beach and gives the book its title. Photo: Courtesy of Jennifer Egan/Pieter M van Hattem

Manhattan beach book review