Manhattan Beach

This book was nothing like anything else I've read from Jennifer Egan, but it was a riveting read in its own right. If you are going into this expecting the character play of Goon Squad or the twist of The Keep, stop now. But if you're looking to be thoroughly engrossed in the world of the book in front of you and content to follow the very human story of the characters presented, you won't be disappointed.

I enjoyed parts of this story about a young woman with a missing father navigating work life in New York in World War II. Anna Kerrigan has a disabled younger sister whom her mother, a former showgirl, stays home to care for. Her father didn't come home one night when Anna was 12 and the family has given up trying to find out what happened to him. So, Anna goes out to work in a Naval Yard factory measuring ship parts, which is how she learns about naval diving and sets her heart on becoming a diver. This is the core of the story and the most sustained and coherent part.

There is more involving gang bosses and shady men that Anna's father had contacts with. This part of the story is less satisfying and has holes that I couldn't ignore. There were a couple of characters that were introduced only to be abandoned–one, Mr. Voss, who had seemed to be a significant character, was literally abandoned in a nightclub just when I thought he was about to become more significant, never to be heard from again. Finally, the ending was literally unbelievable, and left me disappointed with the novel as a whole.

I'm going to have a hard time explaining exactly why I didn't like this without filling my review with spoilers, but I'm going to try my hardest.

There is a part of this book that is great. It's the part where Anna, the protagonist, is trying to break into a man's world as a woman and become a diver. That's the good part of the book: Anna's professional life. It's compelling enough that I wound up finishing this book instead of putting it the DNF pile.

The part I disliked was literally everything else. Everything about Anna's personal life is a mess, and not in a good way. The most egregious part of the story is chock-full of spoilers but I will just say this: if you care one whit about disabled people, you want to skip this book. It's callous in the way it handles its disabled character, and at one point even uses the memory of a hope of what the disabled character could have been had she only been able-bodied to motivate Anna to make a major choice in her own life.

Overall, the book was a massive disappointment, as there was an interesting story buried in it, surrounded by things that ranged from bad to worse to offensive. I would not recommend this to anyone.

When I first started reading Manhattan Beach, it took me back to my obsession with historical fiction when I was in middle school. But, throughout the story there were all these nagging details that kept me from being completely swept away into a different world. Instead of looking up at the end and wondering how Egan had crafted the story in the way she did (like I did when I finished Goon Squad), there were a few things that I found annoying: Egan uses the word “skein” four times throughout the book, I didn't care for the father's side story at all, and many descriptions felt clunky and over the top. Egan is still Egan, the prose is mostly very good, the story is pretty tight. I was just hoping for another five-star book.

Brooklynin satama toisen maailmansodan aikaan. Anna työskentelee telakalla mittaamassa sotalaivojen osia, mutta haluaisi sukeltajaksi – työhön, johon naisia ei oteta, vaikka miehistä olisi pulaa.

Annan isä on kadonnut, sekaannuttuaan gangsteri Dexter Stylesin bisneksiin. Anna kohtaa yökerhossa Stylesin, kiinnostuu tästä ja tutustuu lähemmin mieheen, jonka on tavannut joskus lapsena isänsä kanssa.

Manhattan Beach tarjosi kiinnostavaa ajankuvausta 1940-luvun New Yorkista ja oivallisen, vahvan naispäähenkilön. Kolme tarinaa toivat kirjaan useampia ääniä, mutta olisin ehkä halunnut kuulla Annan ääntä enemmänkin.