Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan is a multi-award-winning American novelist and short story writer. She won the Pulitzer in 2011 for A Visit from the Goon Squad. Manhattan Beach is her fifth novel.
Amazon says:
Manhattan Beach opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression.
'We're going to see the sea,' Anna whispered.
Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Anna observes the uniformed servants, the lavishing of toys on the children, and some secret pact between her father and Dexter Styles.
Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. She is the sole provider for her mother, a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career as a Ziegfield folly, and her lovely, severely disabled sister. At a night club, she chances to meet Styles, the man she visited with her father before he vanished, and she begins to understand the complexity of her father's life, the reasons he might have been murdered.
Mesmerizing, hauntingly beautiful, with the pace and atmosphere of a noir thriller and a wealth of detail about organized crime, the merchant marine and the clash of classes in New York, Egan's first historical novel is a masterpiece, a deft, startling, intimate exploration of a transformative moment in the lives of women and men, America and the world. Manhattan Beach is a magnificent novel by one of the greatest writers of our time.
What I thought:
Much of the action is set in the New York dockyard during World War II. The narrative is a female voice. Well constructed, the novel moves between the characters and timescales. Some of the most vivid writing centres around Anna's attempts and ultimate success at becoming a sub aqua diver. I did feel, as did a fellow reader when we discussed it, that the ending was rushed. As the Guardian reviewer notes, the author decided to withhold crucial scenes until late in the book and I found this unsatisfactory. It seemed to be late in the day to have those revelations. It was this that gave the impression of an abrupt ending.
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