Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

I want to talk to you this morning about a startlingly good book by the Pulitzer Prize winning author, Jennifer Egan. The Pultizer winning book, A Visit From the Good Squad, was a daringly different, even shocking book, but what is surprising about her newest novel, Manhattan Beach,  is that it is a straight-forward historical novel. As one commentator says, 

After stretching the boundaries of fiction in myriad ways…Egan does perhaps the only thing left that could surprise: she writes a thoroughly traditional novel. Realistically detailed, poetically charged, and utterly satisfying; apparently there’s nothing Egan can’t do. 

The novel begins as Anna who is 11 accompanies her father, Eddie, to the home of a rich man, Mr. Styles. Turns out that Eddie takes his young daughter with him often on his rather mysterious business calls. As we come to learn as the novel progresses, Dexter Styles is a gangster, and Eddie Kerrigan works as a messenger for a powerful longshoreman union boss. Anna is a clever girl who could “feel the logic of mechanical parts in her fingertips; this came so natural that she could only think that other people didn’t really try. They always looked, which was as useless when assembling things as studying a picture by touching it.” 

Anna finds herself torn between the life of her mother, sister Lydia, and her Aunt Brianne and the bigger world life of her father. Lydia has a severely crippling disease which renders her unable to care for herself or even to walk and talk, and her mother devotes most of her life to caring for this strangely beautiful but crippled daughter. When Eddie hears the festive gaiety of his wife, sister-in-law and daughters, and notices how things abruptly change at his entrance, he finds himself wondering if the girls and women were easier and happier without him. 

Soon enough, and for reasons that emerge slowly in the novel, Eddie is suddenly gone from the scene and his family has to fend for themselves. This is all occurring in the 30s, and as World War II increasingly consumes the world, Anna seeks employment in the naval shipyards. Eventually she becomes intrigued by the divers who work on the damaged ships, and given the shortage of men, women are hired in many of the traditionally male jobs in the shipyards. Although faced with the sexist behavior of both officers and enlisted, she preservers in her attempts to be certified as a diver. Armed with a letter of recommendation from her supervisor, she is granted an interview with the officer in charge of the divers, although he assumes from the beginning that the supervisor only recommended her in exchange for sexual favors. He accepts her into the program only because he is convinced she will fail. “Ah, your supervisor. Mr…Voss. He drew out the name as though its syllables were the last bits of meat he was sucking from a bone. Then he grinned. ‘I imagine he’s just as eager to please you as you are to please him.’”

Despite being set up to fail, Anna manages to move in the diving dress that weighs several hundred pounds, and she also passes the underwater test that she is meant to fail. Egan manages to portray the sexist attitudes of the time in very clever and understated ways, and the feminism she illumines is a high point of the novel.

Although Eddie Kerrigan is gone from his family, he remains an important part of the novel. After living as essentially a bagman for gangster Dexter Styles, his disappearance seems to be at the hands of the New York mob, and much of the later parts of the novel are taken up with Anna’s attempts to discover how and why he disappeared. While Anna is the primary narrator of the book’s action, Eddie, who somehow escapes his fate at the hands of gangsters, resurfaces as a sailor in the merchant marines and subsequently survives the torpedo sinking of his ship and a harrowing lifeboat adventure. 

I feel I am already revealing a bit too much of the interwoven stories. Besides telling an utterly fascinating story in this novel, Egan also displays the very substantial research she did in order to produce such a riveting account. Her portrayals of life on the docks, women workers in the naval shipyards and even of mob activity in New Jersey and New York all ring with an authenticity due to her very considerable talents as a researcher. She says in her acknowledgments, “I was heartened, during the years I spent circling Manhattan Beach, to know that if nothing more came of the endeavor than the pleasure of having researched it, I would count myself lucky. And we readers are lucky as well that her research ended with this excellent novel. One commentator is moved to exclaim that she may well be the best living American novelist, and another that the book shows she is dizzyingly inventive. Inventive indeed, and also wise and insightful. She has produced a first-rate historical novel that I think will be remembered as much for it historical account as for its fast-paced mesmerizing plot.

Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig

I want to pay tribute to one of the really memorable writers of the last century and the first part of this one. Ivan Doig was born in 1939 and died in 2015. His last novel Last Bus to Wisdom, was published in the year he died. While I want to pay tribute to his entire oeuvre, I will focus in on the final work.

Doig said of himself “I come from the Lariat proletariat, the working-class point of view.” And certainly his novels that dealt with the massive Anaconda copper mine in Montana made it clear that his sympathies lie with the miners, the sheep herders, the homesteaders and not with huge agri-businesses and ranches that came to dominate the western frontier.

I have to admit I came to Doig rather slowly. I found his early novels interesting as stories of the immigrant settlers of Montana, but spoiled reader that I am, I at first saw his writing as a little too simplistic, even rustic. I was used to marvelous women word-weavers like Edith Wharton and Willa Cather. Indeed, I felt I had been short-changed in my university literature courses which focused almost entirely on male writers, and when I discovered I had been assigned the long and rather dull Theodore Drieser novels when I might have been reading the the far superior Wharton, I pretty much gave up reading male novelists and concentrated instead on filling the huge gap in my reading, namely, that of women writers.

Still, Doig represented an important inroad for me back to male writers of the late 20^th and early 21^st century. Judging from his writing, I would say Doig is a good man, even a sweet one, and while I would not characterize him as a political novelist, he certainly wrote of and for common people. I have come to see almost all of his work as quite closely autobiographical. He was one of those rare writers who had best sellers in both fiction and nonfiction.  His superb portrayal of Montana, the nonfiction This House of Sky, is overtly autobiographical, but almost all of his novels have a young male narrator, and a manner of speech, even a type of humor that run like a vein through his works.

In his final novel, the boy narrator, Donal, is orphaned at an early age and raised by his grandmother who is a cook at various restaurants or for cattle and sheep ranches. Although she is a skillful and in-demand cook who could make a lot more money working in restaurants, she takes on the job of cook for the Double W ranch in order to have Donal at her side rather than with sitters. Although I won’t reveal too much of the story, I will reveal that his much-loved grandmother gets cancer and needs an operation and then a place to convalesce. While some nuns in their small Montana town agree to care for her after her operation, Donal has to be found a home until  she recuperates enough to go back to work and reclaim Donal.

He is put on a Greyhound bus which he calls the dog bus and sent clear across country to Wisconsin to live with his only other relative, his Aunt Kitty and her husband Dutch. About the first third of the novel is devoted to his cross-country bus-ride and the many people he meets and gets to sign his autograph book, which he hopes will someday win the Guiness Book of Records for most autographs. Donal is a bit like Lily Tomilin’s character, Edith Ann who is accused of making up stories. When she objects saying that grown ups mean by making up stories, lying, and she doesn’t lie, she then continues, “but you can make up the truth if you know how.” Donal is certainly in this class of storytellers, and his heartwarming and wise story is so full of down-to-earth humor and naïve goodness; he (and Doig) clearly know how to make up the truth.

Unfortunately, his Aunt Kate is a self-absorbed and selfish woman who has no real feelings for her grand-nephew and no idea of how to care for a young boy. Her only use for him is to teach him how to play canasta in order to fill in for one of a foursome who has droped out. Between her screaming at her husband, Herman (aka Dutch), and riding herd on poor Donal, he is facing a long and very boring summer. Turns out Herman (who is German rather than Dutch) is obsessively interested in stories of the wild west, and has spent a great deal of time reading a German author who writes of the shoot-um up west.

It does not take Aunt Kate long to repent of her impulsive offer to care for Donal, and long before the summer is over, she simply sends him back to Montana, though she knows that her sister is no condition to care for him, nor is there a place for him to stay. What could have been a sad and worrisome ride home on the big dog bus becomes a wonderful, rollicking trip when Uncle Herman decides to make his escape from his wife, whom he calls “the Kate,” by accompanying Donal. They head first for a big Indian carnival so Herman can finally see some Indians for himself.

Doig writes about what he knows, and that means about sheep and cattle and the workers who tend them. There is a quiet wisdom that bubbles up from the characters and events in his stories that would be difficult to put in capsule form. Suffice it to say that the more I read him, the wiser he seems, and I also have come to realize his rather plain style of writing serves very well for the stories he wanted to tell. While there is much heartbreak and hardship in all his works, there are also shining examples of loyalty and solidarity. 

Doig resisted the title western writer, and I can understand why. Yes, he writes of the west, of the people, but what he reveals is much wider than simply stories of the west. I am so glad that I allowed him to guide me back into at least a somewhat more balanced set of writers in terms of gender. Like Alice Munro and Elizabeth Strout, Doig reveals the extraordinary in ordinary people and so-called ordinary lives.

White Fur by Jardine Libaire

I started a novel a few weeks ago I was sure I would put down in a few pages: poor girl meets rich college boy and romance flares. The novel in question is White Fur, and I knew after not many pages I would be reading it clear through. The writing is gritty and glamorous, much like its heroine, Elise.

The boy in question, Jamey, is not only very rich, he is also handsome to the point of being beautiful. Jamey’s roommate’s girlfriend reacts to him as most women do. 

She’s scared, in a titillating sense, which is how most girls feel near Jamey. He’s not charming—it’s something weirder, more potent, dangerous. He’s so convincingly disconnected from his beauty that people look away, not wanting to be the one who tips him off with their gawking.

Elise is also arresting but not in a cute, well-dressed way. Instead wrapped in her white fur coat (thrift shop, and probably rabbit fur), she appears disdainful of the male attention directed her way.

Aficionados of sex see her in a crowd. Some guys stumble upon her and crudely realize their luck halfway into it. Some have no idea, and turn her out of bed as if they did what they’d come to do, not understanding they hadn’t even started. Those dudes smoked and hummed while they dressed and she felt sorrier for them than she felt for herself.  

Elise never separates things into day and night, rarely thinks about being a boy or girl, or alive or dead. Without division, there’s less work to do. She floats, free in a cheap and magic 

way.

What Jamey goes for in Elise is her sense of freedom and her expansive knowledge of sex. Although he has been a very good student in the past, once he meets Elise his interest in school evaporates. His ivy league education he equates with his parents and their wealth, and all of it he feels as restriction. Still, when he first takes up with Elise he has no intention of inviting her into his family life, or even into his circle of friends. At first he thinks it’s just the sex.

Although the novel seems to borrow from earlier impossible romances: Romeo and Juliet,  or the star-crossed couple in Westside Story, Libiare brings in the real grit of city life in White Fur. Jamey’s attempts to escape from the pull of family by first giving up school, and then in a more desperate attempt by giving up his trust fund. Still, his family will not let him go, and he finally finds himself locked up in a psychiatric unit and given drugs that threaten to in fact throw him over the edge. 

As a reader of this novel, I was certain on some level that the romance would end, the family and the power of money would win out. And certainly the author is well aware of how power and money go together; she is also aware of the shallowness of the lives of trust-fund kids, and she displays it with great clarity in this rather long love-story.

In one scene when Elise leaves Jamey, and orphan that she is, he thinks he has no way of finding her, 

He think this whole thing looks like a prank. 

It always struck him as suspicious—how she showed up, the girl next door, and kept after him until he fell in love, this choosing between her and his family—it’s too biblical, too tragic, too concise a conundrum for a life as amoral as his. 

He’s never had to be moral. He falls into one of those crevices: a certain kid in a certain society in a certain generation where no decisions remain because his ancestors have finished every single thing within reach…he feels a revelation like adrenalin. If everything is already done, maybe I’m here to undo things.

Alas, things are not as easy to undo as he had thought, and the reach of his family is even wider than he had believed. 

But the family is not aware of the strength of Elise, of her cool contempt for their wealth. Even when the family essentially has him committed, since who, after all, gives up a trust fund and an easy life for a trashy girl in a rabbit coat, unless they are crazy? Elise finds a way into the private clinic and befriends some staff. In one of the most captivating scenes in the novel, she simply walks him out of his prison, and decides she will be able to bring him down from the drug dependency the clinic experience has brought on, and shelter him until they can escape for good.

An unlikely romance for sure, and it may test the credulity of some readers, but I found this to be a powerful and beautifully written book, and I could not help but hold out hope for the lovers. I’m not about to tell you how the story ends, but I hope you will pick up the novel and find out; you will be glad you did.