Manhattan Beach written by Jennifer Egan is a rather long novel (approximately 400 pages) that focuses on the lives of three different people living in New York before and during the second world war. Ed Kerrigan is a husband and father of two daughters, Anna and Lydia, who is forced to engage in morally ambiguous work in order to provide for his family after the onslaught of the great depression. Dexter Styles is a wealthy gangster with connections to both the criminal underworld and the exclusive upper-class worlds that rule New York during this era. Anna Kerrigan is Ed Kerrigan’s oldest daughter, who after his mysterious and unceremonious disappearance finds fulfillment by working in the New York Navy ShipYard to help the war effort. The majority of the novel is set in the early 1940s, several years after Ed Kerrigan disappears from Anna’s life.
That’s about all I can/care to say while remaining as non-spoilery as possible.
To get right into it: I am not a big fan of this book. I didn’t hate it, but I also didn’t particularly enjoy it. There are quite a few things that could have been executed better; the mystery element (this book tries to sell itself as a mysterious thriller, it isn’t very mysterious or thrilling), the character development (or lack thereof, there is an entire slew of secondary characters who appear briefly then disappear with no mention until they become important to the goal of Anna, the main character), but my biggest issue by far comes from Egan’s desire to “otherize” Anna.
I will start by acknowledging that, yes, women were relegated to second-class positions as citizens in the 30s and 40s, even as they took over the men’s jobs during the war. But Egan seems to go out of the way to try to establish Anna’s character as a societal outsider, which just isn’t the case. As the novel nears its end, Anna goes to a club with a friend of hers from work but ends up leaving early with Dexter Styles, as they drive Dexter notes that he disapproves of Anna’s companions: a suspected homosexual man and a girl who is in a relationship with another woman’s husband.
Additionally, when Anna is going through training to become an underwater diver in the shipyard Egan stresses the fact that she is the only woman in the group. Because of this Anna is socially isolated from her fellow trainees, but she feels an odd connection to Mr. Marle, who is the only black trainee. Despite this connection that Anna thinks about more than once, she never approaches Mr. Marle to talk with him during or after their classes (Anna asserts that she could never think of the right thing to say to him, even though it would be perfectly acceptable to talk with him about almost anything since he is a normal human person, but I digress). Before even becoming a diver, Anna doesn’t fit in with her coworkers at the inspection shop because the other women are married and she isn’t (this is the best we could come up with, really?).
It is a bit baffling to me that Egan spends a rather large portion of the novel attempting to establish Anna as some sort of misfit when this just isn’t at all the case. I won’t dispute the fact that it was challenging to be a woman during this era when women were considered second-class citizens, especially in the workplace. But as a pretty young white woman in New York in the 1940s, it is ridiculous to imply that Anna’s struggles were anything remotely comparable to the struggles that blacks in America, like Mr. Marle, were facing. Not once do we hear any account of the effects of racism, or segregation from Anna even though it certainly existed and was common during this era of American history (not to mention the violence and discrimination that also existed against homosexuals). Even after all of the men left to fight in the second world war and their jobs were left vacant, companies hired women to fill the empty positions, but many refused to employ people of color. In fact, chances are, the only reason Mr. Marle was allowed to be a diver is because, as it is mentioned near the novel’s end, he is an excellent welder. Marle has to be exceptional at something before he is even allowed to be a diver. He has to be better than even the white men in order to be deemed worthy of pursuing a position as a diver, Anna did not have to be better than everyone else, she had to be as good as them in order to get the job as a diver. This is just one example of the amount of privilege that Anna has over marginalized communities of this era. She also has plenty of friends and acquaintances aside from her fellow divers who she eventually befriends. Even once she becomes pregnant out of wedlock by a married man, Anna does not suffer any negative social backlash, she moves away, starts fresh, and no one is the wiser. Anna is no pariah. She isn’t an “other”, nor is establishing her as an “other” beneficial to the plot of the novel at all, so I fail to understand why Egan chooses to spend so much of her energy attempting to make this assertion.
TL; DR: In short, Manhattan Beach promised a lot of things, yet didn’t really deliver on any of those promises. The second half of the novel loses focus as it tries to juggle three different points of view, one of which was wholly unnecessary and added nothing but empty, uninteresting length. While the secondary characters were underdeveloped (and in some cases, used more as props and plot devices than as actual humans with their own emotions, thoughts, and agency), the main characters of the book are three dimensional enough and it is interesting to get different vantage points of the same historical time period. Historical fiction isn’t of much interest to me personally, but I would recommend this novel who those who enjoy it who also have the patience to get through about 433 pages of an easily distracted narrative.
Did you see that? Did you hear that? 
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