Manhattan Beach

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan, 423 pages.
Egan won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction for this lyrical, richly detailed novel. Anna Kerrigan, born in the 1920s, watches as her family slowly falls apart during the late 1930s. Her beloved sister Lydia has been unable to care for herself, move, or interact with anyone since her birth. her father Eddie, former theater owner and actor, former bagman for the union, and formerly close to Anna, disappears from their lives. Anna's mother is always there, but she, like Lydia, stays in the background. This is mostly Anna's story.
When the war breaks out Anna takes a job at the Naval Yard, measuring precision parts. She soon finds this work boring and, after seeing divers working on ship repairs, she decides that this is the work for her. While working toward this goal, and losing her remaining family, Anna reconnects with a man from her father's past, Dexter Styles. Egan does a wonderful job of weaving the different threads of this story together. This time, as I read the book in preparation for book group, I found Lydia a little too perfect and mother Agnes a little too one-dimensional, but it is still a very good read.

Manhattan Beach

Manhattan Beach: a Novel / Jennifer Egan, 438 p.

In 1943 New York, Anna Kerrigan longs to leave her tedious job on the waterfront measuring shipbuilding parts with a micrometer for greater excitement.  She finds it by becoming a diver, a highly trained position involving danger and lots of pushing of gender boundaries.  Meanwhile, she is consumed with the search for her absent father, mysteriously disappeared during her teenage years.  What was her father's connection to the charismatic nightclub owner Dexter Styles?   Is he still alive?  Can she trust Dexter?

A very solid and suspenseful piece of historical fiction, strenuously researched.  I enjoyed the strong sense of place, and was hugely amused by the many underworld conversations which all amounted to the same thing: who's better, an Irish criminal or an Italian one?  The most notable element of the plot was for me the nuanced treatment of Lydia, Anna's developmentally disabled sister.  Nostalgia, suspense, and danger on the high seas add up to an engaging read.