Anna’s early work there-using a micrometer to measure and inspect ship parts-was technical and arcane. Writing about the overlapping milieus through which her three protagonists move required knowledge Egan didn’t have, and the Navy Yard sequences were particularly challenging. By the time Anna is 19, Eddie has vanished, America is embroiled in World War II, and Anna-one of the many civilian women working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard-encounters Styles again.
The narrative opens in 1934, as young Anna Kerrigan watches her father, Eddie, who is struggling to keep his family afloat during the Depression by acting as bagman to a corrupt union official, meet with Dexter Styles, a shady nightclub owner.
Manhattan Beach is Egan’s fifth novel, but it’s her first work of historical fiction. But the larger challenges had to do with the work itself, especially its relationship to the past. She felt rusty, and the success of Goon Squad emboldened an already fierce inner critic. When Egan was finally immersed in the new book, she says the early going was tough. “I certainly wasn’t going to stop working on promotion then.” “With Goon Squad, I was having the kind of luck that a writer is very fortunate to get once and seldom gets twice,” she notes. When good things happened-notably a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award-the media cycle began anew. As the hardcover edition struggled, she left no promotional stone unturned trying to give it “some kind of life,” she says. Publicity for Egan’s 2010 novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, also took more time than expected. Though the story is novella length, its unusual serial format took Egan almost a year to devise. She was busy in part with writing “Black Box,” released over nine days that year in tweets from the New Yorker’s Twitter account it was later published in full in the magazine’s science fiction issue. I’m aware of the past-both historical and fictional-gleaming below our conversation, like salvage that may or may not break apart as it is raised.Įgan didn’t begin working on Manhattan Beach in earnest until 2012. The Brooklyn Navy Yard, the bustling World War II shipyard at the heart of the book, is only a few blocks from Egan’s home, but it’s a different place now. And there’s New York in the 1930s and ’40s, the setting for Manhattan Beach (Scribner, Oct.). There’s Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where Egan sits in the home she’s inhabited for 17 years. There’s coastal Florida, where I sit listening to an August downpour thrum on the roof. As I talk with novelist Jennifer Egan by Skype one August morning, I have the odd sense that we are two women speaking from three places.
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