She has also become entranced by the divers she sees emerging from the sea and their work on the underwater hulls of the great ships. Using an assumed name, she makes it her business to cultivate a friendship of sorts with him - thereby generating a great and frightening part of the story. One night, out with a friend, she discovers that Styles is a nightclub owner - with, it emerges, any number of shady operations on the side. Eddie is still missing and Anna has been working in the Brooklyn Naval Yard inspecting parts for the battleship Missouri. When Eddie disappears three years later, she believes that Dexter Styles is somehow involved. In the past she had been his companion as he paid visits to this or that person, passing on discreet envelopes before leaving now she is left at home as he goes about his mysterious business. Now, visiting Styles, Eddie hopes to move his game up a notch in order to afford an invalid’s chair for his severely handicapped younger daughter, Lydia.Īnna is not at all sure what’s going on, but whatever it is, it changes her relationship with her father. Eddie, a longshoreman whom hard times have thrown out of a job, has been working as a bagman for John Dunellen, a corrupt union boss (“a big man with savage dock walloper’s hands” who “gave a drooping, corroded impression, like a freighter gone to rust after being too long at anchor”). She is accompanying her father on a visit to Dexter Styles, some kind of a big shot living in a mansion on Manhattan Beach, the place an overwhelming contrast to the Kerrigans’ tenement apartment in Brooklyn. The new novel is fairly straightforward in construction but superbly devious in plot - its characters time and again blind to the true nature of the situations in which they find themselves.Īnna, elder of Eddie and Agnes Kerrigan’s two daughters, is 11 years old in the mid-1930s when we meet her.

Jennifer Egan’s “Manhattan Beach” follows her Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Visit From the Goon Squad” (2010), a brilliant tour de force which braided the lifelines of a large cast of characters into one ingeniously intricate pattern.

Manhattan beach author jennifer