In Conversation

Where Jennifer Egan Drew the Line for Researching Her New Novel Manhattan Beach

The author of A Visit from the Goon Squad and now Manhattan Beach explains how a desire to tell a story about female strength led her to World War II-era New York, and the water surrounding it.
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By Pieter M. Van Hattem.

Like any writer Jennifer Egan has her obsessions, among hers: female identity, life-altering acts of violence, the persistence of time, and writing unconventional fractured narratives. Unlike most, she’s a shape-shifter. As her five previous novels attest, she’s equally comfortable moving between the gothic, speculative, and traditional forms. Black Box was written in tweets and her last novel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, a novel-in-stories could be called a concept album. It was just a matter of time before she found her way to the classic historical novel. Manhattan Beach set during World War II against the backdrop of New York’s sleazy waterfront follows the intrepid Anna Kerrigan, one of the military’s first female divers, as she explores the disappearance of her father, a former underworld bagman, and in the process becomes entangled with a charismatic gangster. Needless to say, the novel, like Jennifer Egan is full of surprises.

Elissa Schappell: I never expected that Manhattan Beach would be such a feminist book. You’ve said that you couldn’t write a book like this set in contemporary society. That only “the underground nature of female strength allowed me to have a heroine-driven adventure story.” What do you mean?

Jennifer Egan: I feel like my stuff has always really skewed towards the male. I wanted to tell a story about women and female strength at some point . . . and I knew I wanted to write about wartime New York and that just seemed like the obvious time to do the other.

Because first of all the war gave women all sorts of opportunities that couldn’t really be taken away—even though they really were after the war ended. And also in a way it was interesting to write about a time when the strictures on feminine behavior were so different and much stronger. . . . Having an out-of-wedlock child was simply not an option. To write about this time was pretty gratifying.

Your talent and passion for research is legendary. With Look at Me, everyone assumed you’d been a professional model. With A Visit from the Goon Squad the assumption was that you had ties to the music industry. Can I assume that while researching Manhattan Beach you spent time underwater?

I absolutely did not. . . . I’ve never even scuba dived. I’m really afraid to do it. . . . I did wear a Mark 5. And I got a chance to do that in 2009, before Goon Squad came out. It was incredibly uncomfortable. So hot, so cumbersome. Mind-boggingly so. I don’t tend towards claustrophobia at all but if you do, you would not last long. I desperately wanted to get out of it as soon as I got into it. It was tremendously painful. But it was really cool.

Why this material?

That really started with 9/11. There was an invasion on our shores, in our city. That really brought the notion of invasion immediately to mind. . . . I got really interested in New York during the war and that kind of led me to the waterfront. . . . If you look at photos of New York at any time before air travel became ubiquitous and New York harbor stopped being relevant, everything was oriented towards the water. That got me thinking about the waterfront, which led me pretty quickly to the Brooklyn Navy Yard . . . and shipbuilding and repair and quickly learned that diving was a big part of that. . . . So that is how I came to the diving—it was via ship repair.

I saw a picture of a guy in a Mark 5. He was reminiscing on his experience as a civilian diver at the Navy Yard, and for some reason I looked at that picture and had this feeling of resonance or a kind of quickening. It’s that feeling that something is going to lead somewhere.

From Simon & Schuster.

When I heard that the new book was set in the 30s and 40s in the New York underworld, I had this idea or memory that your family was somehow involved with law enforcement, and then I thought that had to be wrong.

My grandfather was a police commander. His name was Edward Egan. He and his partner, going way back, were Truman’s bodyguards, when Truman was a senator and would come to Chicago. And that continued into Truman’s presidency.

I guess that was it.

I come from a sort of classic Irish-American background on my father’s side. . . . That part of the family is still rather connected with law enforcement. One of my sisters is married to a former U.S. Marshal, and she herself worked in a U.S. attorney’s offices for years, specializing in gang prosecution. My uncle was a criminal defense lawyer for years. Listening to Chicago law enforcement shoptalk is a lot of fun. There was a time when I was strongly considering becoming a cop. . . . I thought about it, every year until I turned 35, which is when you can’t take the exam anymore. . . . What worried my husband was the thought that I would really do it. But it would have been so fun. . . . I’ve done ride-alongs with police in New York.

What do you find so appealing about police work?

I think It’s sort of a literary interest. I really love cop shops, cop stories. I love crime literature. I’m into all this stuff. . . . I went to the police academy at one point to watch an exam . . . a simulated experience of having to break into a home or apartment and manage a chaotic criminal situation without getting killed. That was really fun.

I can relate to that. It’s also a bit like being a fiction writer, standing outside a drama, imagining characters in scene, solving mysteries.

With crime, the stakes are inherently high. You know with murder mysteries it’s the epitome of a dramatic story. Immediately there is a question that needs to be answered; you are playing with life and death. Everything is relevant. You never know what is really going to matter ultimately. I’m just drawn to that. However, I didn’t necessarily think there would be crime in this book.

Oh, really?

I came to it exactly the way I came to the diving, which was via the waterfront. The minute you really start to learn about the history of the New York waterfront you immediately learn that it was absolutely rife with crime.

I am not shocked to hear that—and it’s all fascinating, but would you really have said 20 years ago, “My fifth book is going to be a historical novel, and it’s going to be set on the sleazy waterfront in New York City and there are going to be gangs”?

I don’t know. The most mysterious part of the whole writing process for me is where the people come from. I don’t really think of them ahead of time. I really don’t know who will be in a story until I start writing it. I have a time and place and that’s what I begin with. And even though I was interested in all the stuff we have been talking about—I didn’t know who my people would be.

I’ve never heard of anyone who works this way. Who doesn’t know who their characters are going to be until they sit down and start moving their hands. It’s like you’re conjuring them up.

In the spring of 2012, I sat down and basically just started writing. Anna immediately came into existence. She was the first to arrive, and I was more than happy to receive her. And then the rest of them, they just showed up. And that’s what I really count on, because I don’t know any other way to do it. Until I have a literary party, and no one comes, that’s when I’ll have to consider other options for my work life.

I’m curious, do your characters come to you fully formed?

I originally thought Anna would be an innocent, and I was really feeling very unhappy with that. I was getting a feeling that makes me miserable. That I was repeating myself. I’ve already written a book about a girl having a sexual awakening; my first novel was like that and I just said, “No, no, no, no.” As soon as I recognized that that was not Anna’s story—she was not an innocent—I knew the story would have to be opposite of that. Because then you were either a good girl, or a bad girl. That was incredibly exciting to me.

The heroine’s name, Anna . . . Karenina?

Her name was originally Elsa. But that was problematic because of the movie Frozen. Names are so important. Changing someone’s name is like changing your own name. I can’t do that. But I had to. So there were a few steps to figuring out the right name for her. I still wish it were Elsa but it had to go.

But Anna is so fitting.

Ultimately I felt like not only is it O.K. to have an echo of Anna Karenina, in a way I feel like that echo is probably the reason she has the name. Tolstoy’s novel is about a woman who is essentially sacrificed for her sexual promiscuity. She pays the ultimate price for it. In a way there was something kind of thrilling about telling a very different kind of story about that.

Your Anna’s destiny is very different. She’s a badass.

I wish I was more like her that’s all I can say. She’s a tough babe. It was a pleasure to be inside her skin.