Good Reads / Community Library Notes
Manhattan Beach
Jennifer Egan
Review by Priscilla Comen
Manhattan Beach
Jennifer Egan
Review by Priscilla Comen
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan is the colorful story of the Brooklyn Navy yards from 1938 through World War II. It is also the story of Anna who works at the Navy yard and volunteers to be a diver. She loves and cares for her crippled sister, Lydia, and wants her to experience the sea. Anna’s father is Eddie, a sweet Irish man who wants more out of life. He works for Dexter Styles, a real gangster.
Anna meets Styles when she’s a little girl with her father, and again as a grown woman when they make passionate love in the boat house near the pier. Although he’s a tough gangster, he has a soft heart, and carries Lydia to the beach in her wheelchair. Styles works for Mr. Q whom we meet later.
One day Eddie disappears. Anna thinks he’s dead after he’s gone for years. The reader does too. As Style’s ombudsman, Eddie visited casinos, restaurants, and poker games. Author Egan zig-zags back and forth between characters smoothly and effectively, giving each one a defining personality. Anna becomes a diver, and Egan describes the training and the actual diving in perfect detail. When Dexter takes Anna to the dock with all the diving gear, and two male divers, we know why and what they’re looking for. The tension is taut.
Anna and Dexter are alone in their diving dresses, in the darkest, deepest part of the sea. What do they find? Why is it there? What does it mean? Dexter knows that access has its price. Eddie knew that too. Later we find Eddie on a merchant marine vessel. We meet his fellow sailors. When their ship is torpedoed by a German submarine, the men become even closer friends because of helping one another. The ship sinks, but a raft is there for them and they have oars and a few supplies. But no rescue vessel appears, and the men die off, one by one. Will Eddie survive this experience as well? Will Anna see her loving father again? Will she and Dexter renew their affair? Find this well-written story of an historical time on the new fiction shelf of your community library.
Anna meets Styles when she’s a little girl with her father, and again as a grown woman when they make passionate love in the boat house near the pier. Although he’s a tough gangster, he has a soft heart, and carries Lydia to the beach in her wheelchair. Styles works for Mr. Q whom we meet later.
One day Eddie disappears. Anna thinks he’s dead after he’s gone for years. The reader does too. As Style’s ombudsman, Eddie visited casinos, restaurants, and poker games. Author Egan zig-zags back and forth between characters smoothly and effectively, giving each one a defining personality. Anna becomes a diver, and Egan describes the training and the actual diving in perfect detail. When Dexter takes Anna to the dock with all the diving gear, and two male divers, we know why and what they’re looking for. The tension is taut.
Anna and Dexter are alone in their diving dresses, in the darkest, deepest part of the sea. What do they find? Why is it there? What does it mean? Dexter knows that access has its price. Eddie knew that too. Later we find Eddie on a merchant marine vessel. We meet his fellow sailors. When their ship is torpedoed by a German submarine, the men become even closer friends because of helping one another. The ship sinks, but a raft is there for them and they have oars and a few supplies. But no rescue vessel appears, and the men die off, one by one. Will Eddie survive this experience as well? Will Anna see her loving father again? Will she and Dexter renew their affair? Find this well-written story of an historical time on the new fiction shelf of your community library.