Even at age 11, Anna understands the role she's expected to play in charming Dexter and his children, easing the path for her father's opaque, vaguely ominous business dealings. Manhattan Beach opens in Depression-era New York, where Eddie Kerrigan and his daughter Anna visit the palatial home of Eddie's boss, Dexter Styles. The Record Fiction Pulitzer Sneaks Music Writing In Through The Back Door And again, her characters closely consider their own identities, and try, with varying success, to radically change them.
Again, Egan uses a before-and-after structure to create subtle tensions, as characters try to reconcile history and the present. Instead, it's largely a lead-in to a conventional literary mystery. But here, for once, the idea of time as the great destabilizer doesn't seem like a fundamental theme. So it's no surprise that in Egan's latest novel, Manhattan Beach, she returns to a fragmented construction, and her favorite trope. In her stories, time steals people's understanding of themselves, primarily by creating crisis out of contentment. They all examine the way disasters - a drowning, a disfiguring accident, a botched prank - split characters' lives in half, creating gulfs between their early identities and the unrecognizable people they become. traditional spectrum, they all toy with time. Her books are also construction-conscious: Her Pulitzer-winning 2010 novel A Visit From The Goon Squad is designed to read like a collection of loosely related short stories, while 2006's The Keep is simultaneously about a fractured relationship, and the prison inmate telling the story in a creative-writing class.īut no matter where her books fall on the postmodern vs. Her individual short stories often play with form - like "Black Box," constructed from tweet-length field instructions, or "Great Rock and Roll Pauses," told via PowerPoint slides. How?īy now, fans of Jennifer Egan's writing know not to expect straightforward narratives.
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