![]() Anna routinely accompanies her father on his jobs, but there’s something different about this day, about the mysterious Mr. The novel begins in the Depression, with precocious 12-year-old Anna accompanying her father, Eddie, a bagman for a union boss, when he visits Dexter Styles and his family at home. While Manhattan Beach lacks the surface flash of A Visit From the Goon Squad, it’s far from simple or straightforward. It would be wrong to sell Egan short, though. ![]() The humanity of Egan’s work comes to the fore in her powerful and impressive new novel Manhattan Beach, which, on first glance, might appear to be a fairly routine historical novel, with a largely linear narrative and chronology. ![]() ![]() A time-jumping, perspective-shifting collection of linked stories, each told in a different form (including a story told entirely in PowerPoint slides), the book is dazzling, but its great strength wasn’t its cleverness or style it was Egan’s attention to the characters, her empathy and her ability to elicit connections and unifying elements amid the chaos of vastly differing worlds. With the stylistic pyrotechnics of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, readers might have missed something key to that book’s success. ![]()
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