Once Egan establishes the providential initial meeting of the key protagonists, the novel jumps forward a decade to find that Eddie disappeared five years ago and Anna is employed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
She realizes that she “could feel the logic of mechanical parts in her fingertips” of a set of “disjointed tracks.” She “fastened the piece that was vexing the boys,” unknowingly discovering a skill set that would propel her into a promising future. His twin sons have an electric train set that triggers in Anna something beyond envy. Styles’s 8-year-old daughter owns a Flossie Flirt doll that Anna covets. When Eddie takes 11-year-old Anna to Styles’s luxurious mansion at the edge of Manhattan Beach, she is exposed for the first time to an elegant lifestyle that provokes pangs of envy. Eddie, we are told, prefers “danger over sorrow every time.” This penchant for danger and disaster will travel around the world with Eddie. Eddie sees Styles, a nightclub owner with ties to the mob, as his way out and the source of the funds he needs. He is weary of working as a bagman for an unscrupulous local union official. Eddie needs money to buy a special chair for Lydia. Thirty-six-year old Eddie is married with two daughters-Anna, and her physically challenged younger sister, Lydia. The novel begins in Brooklyn in the winter of 1934.
All of them achieve their goals, but with serious consequences. Eddie needs money Anna needs a life of her own Styles needs power. They are motivated by the triumvirate of temptation: money, sex, and power. Their stories are often told in separate narratives until Egan intertwines the three of them in a blockbuster of an ending.įrom the start, the story of the father, Eddie Kerrigan, his daughter, Anna, and the criminally inspired Dexter Styles is a set up for disaster. There is a father, a daughter, and a nefarious New York gangster boss. But like the whole of the novel this is no ordinary triangle. Manhattan Beach seems to be a simple story of an unconventional love triangle. Its background is the war abroad its foreground is the war at home. Depths of relationships, depths of despair, and actual watery depths. But the novel is about anything but surfaces. On the surface, it appears to be a traditionally written historical novel about the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s with crime, deceit, and vengeance at its core. Manhattan Beach is an astounding eye-opener. This time, with only three months to go in 2017, she has written what is probably the most strikingly original novel of the year. In 2010, she won the Pulitzer Prize for the dauntingly unique A Visit From the Goon Squad.
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