"The literature of rivers is small, but not without significance,” writes Australian novelist Richard Flanagan in his introduction to Claudio Magris’s magnum opus, Danube, one of the most important novels in contemporary Italian literature. “River books are forever about lighting out for the territory ... [Danube] seems to be slyly inventing something profoundly new, while all the time pretending to be simply retelling stories that gather along the course of a river.”

According to Flanagan’s description, it is safe to say that Jennifer Egan’s dazzling and sprawling new novel, Manhattan Beach, deserves to be a part of the canon of great river books, for it is a novel that is soaked in the water, in which nearly every scene is set against a river or an ocean. It is a novel in which the ubiquity of the water bodies is not an atmospheric detail, but a central and recurring leitmotif.

This remarkable historical novel traces the life of a Brooklyn-based Irish family through the Great Depression and the Second World War. In the book’s opening passages set in 1934, Anna and her father Eddie are driving to Manhattan Beach to meet a man called Dexter Styles. The latter two have a brief encounter and the lives of these characters do not intersect again until very late in the book. Eventually, we learn that Eddie works for Dexter, who is a swindler with deep ties to the Irish-run New York mobs and the underworld. A few years later, just as the United States is gathering itself up from the jolts of the Great Depression, the war arrives, drawing in thousands of men and allowing the women to enter the workforce. Anna, whose father by this point has completely disappeared from her life without a trace, joins the Brooklyn Naval Yard to help with the war efforts and to discover the men whom she suspects catalysed the disappearance of her father.

Jennifer Egan’s follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit From the Goon Squad shows a writer at the peak of her literary powers

The Naval Yard proves to be a chauvinistic regime with only the most menial jobs reserved for women. Anna spends her time measuring spare parts of battleships, but secretly hopes to join the team of valiant divers who do repairs underwater. Serendipitously, the war has depleted the reserves of male divers and Anna soon finds herself donning the heavy diving gear that can weigh up to 100 kilograms, and the underwater bay becomes her new workplace. However, while at work Anna dabbles in naval mechanics, at home she helps her mother, Agnes, in taking care of her severely disabled sister, Lydia.

The novel is dexterously researched and Egan’s brilliant details of harbours and the mechanics of battleships never hit a false note. Yet it is not when Egan is writing about the war, the Great Depression or the Naval Yard that the novel is at its most arresting; the most deeply affecting moments in the book are those that capture the minutiae of personal and filial turmoil. Like any skilled novelist, Egan understands the inner commotion of disrupted families and it is in moments when she limns the personal losses, remorse and guilt of bringing up a handicapped child that the novel reaches soaring heights.

Manhattan Beach is a highly accomplished work by a writer at the height of her powers, but all the same it is not a book we expected from Egan, especially as a follow-up to her brilliantly inventive and genre bending A Visit from the Goon Squad — which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2011. In this previous book, Egan audaciously turned the form of the novel on its head and in 13 moving chapters that read like interconnected short stories, each from a different character’s point of view and written in a remarkably unique style, she performed a wildly ingenious act of literary acrobatics that defied narrative continuity and linearity of time. It even boasted a chapter in the form of a PowerPoint presentation.

The fact that Egan chose to follow such a technically dynamic book with a novel so traditional and conventional in the true sense of the word is a testament to, not against, her remarkable literary prowess. It proves that Egan is a magnificent storyteller in the old-fashioned sense, just as she is an experimental literary ventriloquist.

Traditional it is, but Manhattan Beach is also many different things. Combining elements of genres as disparate as noir and crime thriller, family drama and war saga, it is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a city and a family, but more than anything else, it is a love song to New York; an ode to Manhattan — Manhattan, the island, surrounded by water. It is in the water that Egan’s characters find solace and liberation, and it is the deep tide of this novel that sweeps the reader into a mesmerising cascade of loss and triumph.

The reviewer is a Karachi-based freelance writer

Manhattan Beach
By Jennifer Egan
Scribner, US
ISBN: 978-1476716732
448pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, December 24th, 2017