The only possibility for redemption lies in the sea, which in Manhattan Beach is a site of epiphany and boundless potential, pitiless and stark and revelatory.

Her father’s abandonment is a massive betrayal because it uproots her life so thoroughly in the aftermath, she clings to Lydia as “a last still point amid so much wrenching change.” “I cannot accept this,” Eddie thinks of his life, “I will not be made happy by this.” He is desperate for a change, or at least for time to stop passing long enough for him to find a way to make a change before it is all too late and his life is over.Īnna, meanwhile, longs for social progress, for it to be possible for her to dive without censure, or to live alone if she chooses to - but she finds any change to her personal life appalling. “I look at my face and see no real change obviously I am kidding myself!” “The boys of my youth are fat, balding, and in three cases dead,” Anna’s mother writes in a letter. While it might not have the flashy setup that A Visit From the Goon Squad did, it’s preoccupied with the same central question: How is it possible to live in the world, knowing that time - the titular goon of Visit - is going to have its way with all of us, eventually? That we must grow old, must die, and that all that will come after we’ve devoted our lives to other people, waiting for them to grow old and die too? And slowly, she begins to spend more and more time with one of her father’s old business associates, the one who used to represent to both Anna and Eddie the life of wealth and ease that they should have had, and who offers to Anna the possibility of a perverse kind of fatherly approval.īut don’t be fooled by the straightforward plotting: Manhattan Beach is still vintage Egan. She works her way up to becoming a diver. Lydia is, Eddie notes, a beauty, but her helplessness disgusts him, and he resents her for taking his wife and older daughter’s attention away from him.Įddie disappears when Anna is a teenager, and she grows to hate him: how could he abandon her and her mother and her disabled sister? How can they all survive? When World War II starts, she takes a job in the shipyards. Eddie, meanwhile, adores Anna, but he can’t make himself love his younger daughter Lydia, who cannot sit upright unassisted or speak coherently. Principally, Manhattan Beach concerns Anna, who as a child during the Depression idolizes her father, Eddie, and is only half aware that he is making ends meet by working as a courier for different criminal gangs. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark Manhattan Beach is more straightforward than Goo n Squad, but just as thoughtful

Manhattan beach novel review