I don’t know what you mean, I haven’t done those things, she imagined saying, truthfully, to a faceless accuser. In the dark paddock, she slipped from her life like a pin dropping between floorboards. But soon enough, layers of clothing began to yield to the marvel of bare flesh…Even as she spent her days aching to renew their dark dream, she felt as if it were happening somewhere else, to a different girl. In her early teens, she and a neighborhood boy experiment with each other’s bodies, “mov with the stealthy rapacity of burglars - initially, to repeat the raptures of their first encounter. He takes her to the house of Dexter Styles for a fateful meeting that will result in Eddie’s disappearance a few years later, leaving Anna, her mother, and Lydia, her severely disabled sister, to fend for themselves.īrave and capable, Anna is nonetheless haunted by the feeling that she is a “corrupt interloper bluffing her way through life.” On the surface, she is a good girl, a façade that she takes great pains to promote, going so far as to never let a sip of alcohol pass her lips when with her mother and aunt, even though she imbibes with friends. We first meet her in 1934, as an 11-year-old who “might as well have been a boy: dust in her stockings, her ordinary dresses not much different from short pants,” accompanying her father, Eddie, on his rounds as a bag man who passes bribes and collects payments for an Irish mobster in New York City. Jennifer Egan follows the story of one of those women in Manhattan Beach, her first novel since the brilliant, Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad.Īnna Kerrigan is Rosie the Riveter, only in a dive-suit.

Since then, women have labored side by side with men on the factory floor, in white-collar jobs, and in the military and law enforcement. Once women realized they could be relieved of the drudgery of housework and gain economic independence, there was no going back. World War II introduced a profound shift in American society as men were drafted into the military and women into the workplace.

Manhattan beach novel