Writing four novels is no guarantee that you’ll complete a fifth. Readers may love you; critics may praise you; you might win a big prize. None of it helps when you find yourself back at the beginning, confronted with your own unredeemable prose, convinced, as Jennifer Egan was not so long ago, that you’ll never produce a decent chapter again. “The book was bad,” she told me recently. “I did one draft that was absolutely unspeakable. But that’s normal.” Then she wrote a second draft, and despaired. “I thought very, very seriously about abandoning it, because I just thought, Hell—the distance between this and something anybody is ever going to want to read is too great for me to span.”
The book was “Manhattan Beach,” Egan’s latest novel—her fifth, if you’re going by its October publication date, though it has been in progress for close to fifteen years. In that time, Egan has published two other books, “The Keep” and “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, in 2011. Her sons, Manu and Raoul, have grown from toddlers to teen-agers. “They were so young when ‘Goon Squad’ came out that I think they somewhat regarded me as a failure,” she said. “From their point of view, I’m essentially a stay-at-home mom.”
Egan, at fifty-five, is about as famous as a contemporary American literary novelist can expect to be, but it can be hard to say what kind of novelist she is. She is a realist with a speculative bent of mind, a writer of postmodern inclinations with the instincts of an old-fashioned entertainer. She’s known for her roving, unpredictable imagination, and for the dazzling ingenuity of her narrative conceits. “Goon Squad,” a Proustian meditation on rock music and lost time, hopscotched through the past, the present, and the future, switching protagonists and voices with each chapter. “The Keep” (2006), a neo-gothic fable of technology and paranoia set in an Eastern European castle, is also the story of a romance between a murderer and the instructor of his prison creative-writing class. In 2012, Egan wrote a short story, “Black Box,” a tightly controlled spy thriller, as a series of tweets. She had little knowledge of the medium, and composed each tweet by hand in a notebook.
Because she is interested in technology, American society, and the passage of time, Egan can sometimes seem capable of predicting the future. In the last chapter of “Goon Squad,” which was published in the age of the iPhone but mainly written before it came on the market, she introduced the Starfish, a touch-screen handset for children. (Two parents argue over when to allow their daughter to use one, maybe the first depiction in literature of that losing battle.) For her second novel, “Look at Me” (2001), she invented a proto-social-media platform, Ordinary People, whose members compress their personalities into carefully crafted profiles and submit to perpetual Webcam surveillance. Fans tune in; advertisers glom on. When Egan went on “Charlie Rose” to promote the book, Rose questioned her about the rise of “reality-based entertainment”—“Survivor” had come out the previous year—as if she might be partly responsible.
One of the main characters in “Look at Me” is Z., a Lebanese terrorist who teaches high-school math in the Midwest as he plots a strike on the United States. Egan worked on the book for six years; it was a week away from publication when the World Trade Center towers were hit. The F.B.I. agents whom Egan consulted had told her that the average terrorist was likely to be young, callow, fairly inept. But Egan made Z. a well-educated, sophisticated polyglot, integrated into the culture that he dreams of destroying—much as, it turned out, the main 9/11 hijackers had been.
“You just march right back in there and keep marching around and around until he sees you’re good enough to put back in the marching band.” Link copied
Egan told me that her invented technologies were “easy predictions.” Z.’s terrorism plot was of another order, but, still, “everyone knew that there were people around who wanted to do this stuff.” She credits any powers of foresight she might possess to “the energy of logic,” a phrase she got from the novelist Jane Smiley. The vector of the present points the way to a number of possible futures. Interpret the signals with care, and reality may well end up mimicking your own projections.
With “Manhattan Beach,” Egan took the energy of logic in the opposite direction. The novel is a conventionally structured work of historical fiction set in Brooklyn during the nineteen-thirties and forties, a period that she became curious about in the wake of 9/11. The attacks felt like the end of something—the United States’ sense of itself as king of the world, snug in its supremacy. “And that led me to think, Well, what was the beginning of that something?” she said. “Somehow it felt like it was World War Two, this violent conflict in which we played a critical but relatively small part in such a way that it left us quite unscathed and tremendously dominant.”
Egan was sitting in her office, a cozy, cluttered room with buttermilk-yellow walls on the third floor of the Fort Greene brownstone where she lives with her husband, David Herskovits, a theatre director. The windows looked out on a lush back yard. Egan, an avid gardener, had just given me a tour of her three compost bins, plunging her fingers into the pungent soil to hold up fat worms with a fisherman’s pride for a good catch.
The Marie Kondo gospel of minimalism has not made a convert of Egan. She loves to be surrounded by stuff. While plucking a family photograph from the mantel of her dining-room fireplace, she set off an avalanche of picture frames, kids’ drawings, candlesticks, Christmas ornaments, an Irish American Writers & Artists crystal award plaque, and a mysterious plastic soda bottle containing a slip of blue paper. “That’s a conceptual art piece Manu made,” Egan explained. She collects interesting baseballs, the hollow seedpods dropped by California scrub oaks, cheesy porcelain figurines. The house décor reflects Egan and Herskovits’s playful love of kitsch. Upon crossing the threshold, visitors are greeted by a chandelier that resembles Chiquita Banana’s headpiece.
In Egan’s office, a large, L-shaped desk takes up a wall. Cuddles, a snowshoe Siamese with a myopic stare, stretched out on top of it, covering a pile of papers. “Cuddsie!” Egan cooed. “She’s my sub-intelligent daughter. She’s very pretty, but she’s very dumb.” Regarding her indulgently, she told Cuddles, “You have your own survival mode, which is beauty!”
Across the room, a mahogany bookcase was packed with volumes that Egan had used to research “Manhattan Beach.” At first, she had imagined that the novel would span the second half of the century, ending with the World Trade Center attacks. But, as she poked around in the forties, she got interested, then absorbed, then obsessed with the period. To fix the cadences of the time in her ear, she watched noir movies and read Damon Runyon, Raymond Chandler, and Harold Q. Masur. Contentedly messy in daily life, she is rigorously organized in her work. On her iPad, she kept an ever-expanding encyclopedia of notes, alphabetized by subject: Advertising. Bars. Books. Businesses. On her iPhone, she kept lists of questions: Where did the urban poor bury their dead? Were ballgames played on Sunday? Did rubber bands exist?
Egan writes her fiction longhand, at a clip of five or six pages a day, sitting in an overstuffed IKEA armchair that lives in her office, or, when the weather is good, in a Zero Gravity recliner that she sets up under the magnolia tree in her back yard. The process quiets her critical brain; she can let herself riff. After a year and a half, she typed up the nearly fourteen hundred handwritten pages she had produced and read them cold.
“You know, caricaturish people, horrible dialogue, stupid and obvious moves, blundering historical context,” Egan said, when I asked her what about her manuscript had so revolted her.Her voice grew hard with disgust as she catalogued her failures. “And so, when you put all that together, you end up with something that’s truly nauseating. And I kind of mean that literally. I felt physical illness reading my own work.” Making fiction about the forties was like trying to speak a foreign language by consulting a grammar book. She was awash in facts, but facts only describe the past; they don’t give it new life. “It just felt like this fetid, uncomfortable, miserable landscape that I couldn’t leave, and I also couldn’t navigate,” she said. “It was a nightmare.”
Much of “Manhattan Beach” takes place at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where Anna Kerrigan, the novel’s nineteen-year-old protagonist, goes to work during the war, first in a factory and then as a diver, walking on the bottom of the East River to repair the underbellies of aircraft carriers and battleships. Before Anna can dive, she has to pass a test. Suited up, with her hands squeezed into three-fingered gloves, she is given a knotted rope to untie. “There was an area in every knot that would yield when you pushed on it hard and long enough,” Egan writes. “It was like pushing through a wall to find a hidden chamber just beyond it.” When the knot comes undone and Anna is released from her suit, she feels “as if she were floating, even flying.” That’s how Egan says she felt when she had her breakthrough on the novel. She often dreams about finding a door that leads to an unknown room, like the one that Anna senses in metaphor. Sometimes the door leads to a garden. They are wonderful dreams. They are dreams about writing.
It can be tempting for even the most rational among us to attribute features of our personalities to the stars. “You’re a Virgo! I could have guessed that,” Egan told me, when she learned that my birthday, like hers, falls in early September. She is reliable, efficient, focussed: Virgo qualities. So is the perfectionism that almost crushed her as she worked on “Manhattan Beach.” She once wept over a typo in one of her short stories published in The New Yorker, and, when the Times Magazine had to run a correction on an article she’d written, she said, “I was gaga with misery.” Other symptoms are more benign. One day, when Egan made us ham and turkey sandwiches for lunch, she neatly squeezed each slice of meat between paper towels to insure that all were equally dry.
Or maybe geography is responsible for her temperament. Egan grew up in San Francisco, and her claims of New York-style neurosis are balanced by a sunny California attitude—many things are “excellent” and “cool”—as well as by a can-do pragmatism that might be traced to Chicago, where she was born, in 1962. She has Midwestern roots on both sides. Egan’s paternal grandfather was a prominent Chicago police commander; in her office is apicture of him grinning next to Harry Truman. Her maternal grandfather was an orthopedic surgeon in Rockford, Illinois. Egan spent a lot of time there as a child, examining her grandfather’s medical specimens and making cookies with her grandmother, using walnuts from their own trees. The house was filled with funky murals painted by Egan’s great-grandfather, who had once been an acrobat with a travelling circus. “Rockford for me has that mythical quality that childhood landscapes have in memory,” she said. After her grandmother died, in the early nineties, Egan found herself drawn back there. She stayed in motels, scoping out the scene. Rockford ended up serving as a key setting in “Look at Me,” a place that represents all that is repressive about small-town American life, and all that might be redemptive about it, too.
“Remember all those 401(k) contributions we matched? Well, now we need a favor.” Link copied
The Rockford house was a rare point of childhood stability. Egan’s parents divorced when she was two. She grew up mainly with her mother, Kay, an art dealer, and her stepfather Bill Kimpton; their son, Graham, was born when Egan was six and a half. She spent Sundays with her father, Donald, a corporate lawyer, going to church and then out for burgers. Egan loved her dad, but she could see that he was troubled. He was a devout Catholic, and had initially refused to grant Kay a divorce; the marriage was ultimately annulled. He also had a serious alcohol problem. “I think he was very much of the school where youwin the woman, and then she starts cooking your dinner and you go out drinking with your friends again,” Egan said. “And my mother would be the first to say that she was a rather pampered, beautiful, catered-to creature. And she wasnot going to put up with that.”
