Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Manhattan Beach is the second book I’ve read by Jennifer Egan, after A Visit from the Goon Squad. Having grown up in Manhattan Beach (the one in Brooklyn, not L.A.), I was curious about a novel named after it, but this has little to nothing to do with the actual location aside from a key early scene there.

At heart, this novel reads like a thriller or action story, and I was interested to find out what would happen, but for this kind of book it gets bogged down in an awful lot of descriptive detail. In its favor, it’s a very well researched book. The descriptions of the Brooklyn Naval Yard and learning to become a diver were remarkably vivid. Unfortunately, Egan doesn’t let you forget how much research she did, ever, and I often felt like I was reading a research report rather than a novel.

The characters seem to be created for the purposes of the story, too, and often struck me as unconvincing. Anna, the lead, is naturally a very sympathetic character because of her circumstances, but she acts in ways that sometimes seemed contrived to move the plot along. Other characters are straight from the stock collection: a mobster who’s really not that bad, a very misunderstood father, a Black man who harasses and intimidates a character but then saves his life, etc.

Egan writes some scenes beautifully–I wanted to mark my page to come back to them–but there are others that are just as notable for their wordy obtuseness. Ultimately, I found myself with the same reaction as I had for Egan’s Goon Squad book: impressed with the accomplishment, but not really liking it very much in the end.