Stanley: For some reason, I wasn’t all that intrigued by a lot of the aspects of gender politics that Egan presents in her new book. Throughout the book, Brianne tells Anna about how she lives off suitors and trysts with successful men, but at the end of the book we find out she is self-sufficient and working at a bar and living alone. Anna finds Brianne’s leveraging of femininity for social and monetary benefits as “stale,” a tool that does not work anymore because she is not in her sexual prime. She douses herself in perfume and begins to flirt with the man behind the ticketing booth at Grand Central Station. For example, Brianne tells Anna she has to use “all my wiles” to acquire two tourist sleeper tickets from Chicago to San Francisco. She reflects that there is “so much power in that slim band.” Egan has presented a world in which women’s independence is gained by their attachment or implied attachments with men, and visible markings of conventional womanhood are crucial to achieving this power.Īnna’s aunt Brianne’s femme presentation, on the other hand, is presented as comical. When she is on a train while visibly pregnant, she notices how people are only friendly and offer aid after they’ve seen her wedding ring. By the end of the book, Anna dons another disguise when she buys a wedding ring at a pawn shop to hide the fact that she is pregnant and unmarried. Upon first meeting Anna, Nell advises her to wear lipstick to work so her boss will be more lenient and let her leave the office for lunch. Anna’s coworker Nell, for example, is hyper femme, and uses traditional markings of femininity to gain advantage in the male dominated society of ’50s New York City. Liz von Klemperer: I was drawn to the theme of using conventional femininity as a survival tool. With Manhattan Beach, Egan once again demonstrates her mastery of the sweeping, multi-character narrative.

Of course, the investigation is merely the tipping point from which conflict proliferates and allows the vast narrative to breathe. True to the novel’s noir-inflected atmosphere, Anna investigates her father’s life, looking for answers to the questions that have dogged her. At the center of its orbit is one Anna Kerrigan, haunted by the mystery of her father’s disappearance. The characters in Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan’s latest novel range from sailors to gangsters, bankers, and union workers. Stanley discuss Jennifer Egan’s National Book Award–longlisted historical novel Manhattan Beach.

In this edition, Liz von Klemperer and T.A. Double Take is a literary criticism series in which two readers tackle a highly-anticipated book’s innermost themes, successes, failures, trappings, and surprises.

Manhattan beach novel review