MANHATTAN BEACH
BOOK CLUB KIT
ABOUT THE NOVEL
A NOTE FROM JENNIFER EGAN
Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to visit Dexter Styles, a man
who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. She is mesmerized by
the sea beyond the house and by some charged mystery between the two men.
Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the
Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that once belonged to men,
now soldiers abroad. She becomes the rst female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive
of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. One evening at a
nightclub, she meets Dexter Styles again, and begins to understand the complexity of her
father’s life, the reasons he might have vanished.
MANHATTAN BEACH takes us into a world populated by gangsters, sailors, divers, bankers,
and union men in a dazzling, propulsive exploration of a transformative moment in the
lives and identities of women and men, of America and the world.
Dear Book Club Members—
Thank you so much for choosing to spend your
precious time reading MANHATTAN BEACH!
I am a huge fan of book clubs, which I rmly
believe are responsible for keeping Americans
reading. It’s a lot more fun to read when you
can talk about the book with someone.
I began researching MANHATTAN BEACH in
2005, which was a lucky thing, since many
of the people I was interviewing—men and
women who had worked in the Brooklyn
Navy Yard during World War II, deep sea
divers, sailors, and longtime New Yorkers
with good memories—were already in their
eighties then. I began writing in 2012, and
continued to research in a more focused (sometimes
frantic!) way until the book was completed in spring 2017. You will nd some photos and
artifacts of my research if you look around my website, JenniferEgan.com.
Please let the Book Club Favorites team know if there is anything we can do to enhance
your book club’s experience of MANHATTAN BEACH. I know that reading time is scarce in
most of our lives, and I’m honored and grateful that you’ve chosen to spend yours reading
my novel.
Fondly,
SEE IT FOR YOURSELF
A vintage document from the era,
“The Merchant Marine’s 10
Commandments.”
Women who worked at the Navy Yard,
subjects of Jennifer Egan’s research for
Manhattan Beach
.
No longer there, The Manhattan
Beach Hotel was once a grand
seaside resort.
Jennifer Egan tries on the kind of diving suit that Anna Kerrigan
would have worn when working at the Navy Yard during World War II.
SET THE MOOD WITH A SPOTIFY PLAYLIST
CURATED BY JENNIFER EGAN
SONGS ON PLAYLIST:
“Sing, Sing, Sing”
BENNY GOODMAN THE ESSENTIAL BENNY GOODMAN
“It Don’t Mean A Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”
LOUIS ARMSTRONG, DUKE ELLINGTON THE GREAT REUNION
“Who Walks In When I Walk Out”
LOUIS ARMSTRONG, ELLA FITZGERALD IN PERSON
“Look! Four Hands”
LIONEL HAMPTON AND HIS ALLSTARS LIONEL HAMPTON AND HIS ALLSTARS COMPLETE JAZZTONE RECORDINGS
“Them There Eyes”
CARMEN McRAE CARMEN McRAE SINGS LOVER MAN AND OTHER BILLIE HOLIDAY CLASSICS
“Ain’t Misbehavin’”
ANITA O’DAY WITH ORCHESTRA TEA FOR TWO
“In The Mood”
ARTIE SHAW ON THE RADIO
“Everybody Loves My Baby (But My Baby Don’t Love Nobody But Me)”
GLENN MILLER AND THE ARMY AIR FORCE ORCHESTRA THIS IS GLENN MILLER AND THE ARMY AIR FORCE BAND
“Royal Garden Blues”
COUNT BASIE THE SWINGING COUNT
“Two O’Clock Jump”
HARRY JAMES TRUMPET BLUES: THE BEST OF HARRY JAMES
“Brooklyn Boogie”
LOUIS PRIMA JUMPIN’ WITH THE BIG SWING BANDS
“Night And Day”
BILLIE HOLIDAY THE ESSENTIAL BILLIE HOLIDAY
“Going Up”
JOHNNY HODGES, DUKE ELLINGTON SIDE BY SIDE
“I’m Gonna Paper All My Wall”
RAY ANTHONY & HIS ORCHESTRA DIXIE
https://spoti.fi/2Lx17Ht
LISTEN HERE
TOPICS & QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. In the rst chapter, on the beach, Anna walks barefoot despite the cold and says,
“It only hurts at rst. After a while you can’t feel anything.” Dexter admires Anna for
her strength, which he senses comes from her father. He reects that, “The toughness
he’d sensed coiled in Ed Kerrigan had owered into magnicence in the dark-eyed
daughter… men’s children gave them away” (pages 8–9). How does this meeting
between Dexter, Ed, and Anna set the tone for the rest of the novel?
2. Why is the thought of what Lydia “might have looked like, had she not been damaged”
(page 16) so painful to Ed? Why is he unable to cope with Lydia, much less love her, as
Anna and Agnes do?
3. “Each time Anna moved from her father’s world to her mother and Lydia’s, she felt as
if she’d shaken free of one life for a deeper one. And when she returned to her father,
holding his hand as they ventured out into the city, it was her mother and Lydia she
shook o, often forgetting them completely. Back and forth she went, deeper—deeper
still—until it seemed there was no place further down she could go. But somehow there
always was. She had never reached the bottom” (page 26). What does this passage
reveal about Anna? What allows, even compels, her to shift between worlds?
4. Ed, looking back on his decision to work with Dexter, reects that he needed a change,
that “[h]e’d take danger over sorrow any day of the week” (page 34). Is Ed’s philosophy
a noble or a selsh one?
5. What draws Anna to Nell? And Nell to Anna? How are they each not “angels” and how
does this bond them?
6. Even at a young age, Dexter wants to know what’s beneath the surface of things. “For
him, the existence of an obscure truth recessed behind an obvious one, and emanating
through it allegorically, was mesmerizing” (page 91). How does this fascination shape
Dexter’s life and his career?
7. How does Anna’s relationship with Leon, during which she thinks things like “
I might
not be here
” and “
This might not be me
” (page 120), relate to her feeling abandoned by
her father? Why does she later invoke her father as “an abstract witness to her virtue”
(page 122)?
8. Why does Anna set herself such a dicult task—becoming a diver, “breaking” the
lieutenant in charge of the diving team, facing opposition at every turn? Why does she
feel “that she had always wanted [an enemy]” (page 149)?
9. Leaving the club with Dexter, Anna releases herself to the dark: “she had…disappeared
through a crack in the night. Not a soul knew where to nd her” (page 234). What do
you make of her need to be lost, to be a part of the dark and its danger?
10. Ed is simultaneously drawn to and infuriated by the ship’s bosun. Discuss why there is a
push and pull between these two characters.
11. Why does Dexter insist on diving with Anna? What does this eort represent for him?
What do you think he comes to understand?
12. When Anna takes the train west, there’s a moment when she “bolted upright. She had
thought of her father. At last, she understood:
This is how he did it
” (page 426). What
allows her to understand and perhaps reconcile with her father?
13. Luck plays an important role throughout the novel and has particular signicance for
Anna, Dexter, and Ed. How does luck shape each of their lives? Good luck and bad luck?
14. Throughout the novel, characters create new identities for themselves and start over.
How do these individual stories of reinvention relate to the spirit of optimism, the quest
for the new that was so common among Americans at that time?
ENHANCE YOUR BOOK CLUB
1. Read a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Rex Stout, or Ellery Queen
from the 1940s, as Anna does. Discuss what draws Anna to these stories.
2. Watch some classic noir lms, such as
Laura
or
Gilda
from the 1940s, or watch noir-
inspired lms that came later, such as
On the Waterfront
or
Chinatown
. How do their
narratives and archetypes compare to those in
Manhattan Beach
?
3. If you live in or near New York, explore the Brooklyn Navy Yard Center’s resources and
programs at Bldg92.org. Discuss what working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World
War II might have been like.
4. Listen to Jennifer Egan’s playlist: https://spoti./2Lx17Ht
How did you begin writing this book?
It all starts with a time and a place for me, and with
Manhattan Beach
that was New York
during World War II. I did ve years of occasional research—interviews with people in their
eighties, which could not be deferred, and visits to evocative places—between 2005 and
2010, during which time I was also writing other books. I began writing in 2012, and it took
almost exactly ve years from start to nish.
I think my curiosity about the era originated with 9/11, which turned New York into a war
zone overnight, leading me to wonder what the city had felt like during our last world war.
This led me to images of the waterfront.
Q&A WITH THE AUTHOR
What sort of images?
I was intrigued by photos of 1940s New York City by Andreas Feininger in which the water
seemed to be ever present—almost as if the center of the city lay at its edges. Looking
at those pictures made me aware of the
port
of New York in a way I never had been in
almost 20 years of living here! One photo was of the hammerhead crane at the Brooklyn
Navy Yard, which sparked my interest in that remarkable place—unbeknownst to me, the
largest builder and repairer of Allied ships during World War II! While doing research on the
Navy Yard, I chanced upon a photo of a civilian diver in a Mark V diving dress, which raised
a shiver of excitement I’ve learned to pay attention to; it means that I’m encountering a
portal into some aspect of my ction.
And it was the waterfront, and ultimately the sea itself, that led me into the various realms
the novel occupies, including the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the merchant marine, deep-sea
diving, and organized crime.
What kind of work did divers do at the Brooklyn Navy Yard? Were there actually any
female divers like Anna Kerrigan working there?
Diving was an important part of ship repair because divers would go in and examine what
was wrong with the ship from underneath. And divers would also patch ships from the
outside. But also, what divers did a lot of was salvaging. They helped to clear out harbors
after the Germans ed. They were an extremely important part of the war eort both
militarily and in a civilian setting.
The rst women didn’t dive in the Navy until the 1970s, and in the Army, the 1980s. It’s
unlikely that any women became civilian divers at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but because the
civilian diving program was largely undocumented, we don’t know for sure that women
DIDN’T dive there. That was my window of opportunity!
What else did you learn about women’s work during the war?
I interviewed a woman named Ida who was extremely proud of her welding abilities and
actually had some real seniority in the Navy yard. She was a working-class woman who still
needed to work after the men came home from the war, and thought quite reasonably that
she could be hired as a welder. But she described being laughed at repeatedly when she
would apply for welding jobs.
That was really powerful to think about, that women were begged to do work they’d been
told all their lives they couldn’t do, and then, after they’d proved beyond anyone’s wildest
expectations that they could do it well, they were mocked for imagining that they might
continue to do it after the war.
How do you write such unique characters?
My writing process, mostly by hand for ction, is geared toward accessing my unconscious—
which is much smarter than I am. Ideally, characters arrive wholly formed and usually
even named. My rst draft, which is instinctive, unpredictable, and mostly unsuccessful,
is really just about collecting promising material. I feel less in the position of “creating”
characters than of recognizing them, inhabiting them, and trying to bring to the surface
their contradictions (an essential element of any personality), modes of speech, and habits
of mind. There’s always the danger that the characters will just be products of ideas. In
my opinion, those aren’t the books you just
have
to read; you may admire and even be
nourished by them, but there isn’t that sort of heart-ripping quality that I strive for beyond
everything else. I tend to write badly when I’m writing about myself, or someone like me,
so nding the distinctions between my characters and myself is always crucial, and needs
to happen right away. That’s one reason I love to write from a male perspective—the
separation from myself is clear and distinct.
How was writing this book dierent from your prior novels?
Between books, I tend to throw out everything I did the last time, because the tools I’ve
used to write the previous book will not only not work for the next project, they will ruin it.
In
A Visit from the Goon Squad
a lot of the big action happens ostage, and we see people
dealing with the aftermath of things. With
Manhattan Beach
, it was exciting to tell an old-
fashioned adventure story in which huge events happen right on the page. It allowed for a
kind of lush, headlong writing that I don’t think I’ve had the opportunity to indulge in until
now. There was just something thrilling to me about dramatizing someone going to sea,
experiencing a shipwreck, and having to try to survive. And the gangland murders were
fun, too!
What kinds of books do you like to read, and what are a few of your favorites?
I’m always reading, and I love both physical books and audiobooks. What matters to me is
being swept away into another world by books that are both ambitious and atmospheric. I
like complexity and layers and depth. Above all, I like the sense of discovery—a feeling that
I’m encountering something unlike anything else I have read. Any genre can provide these
qualities when done well: thrillers, mysteries, gothic tales, short stories, historical ction. I
love 19th century ction, which has all the same gorging pleasures as serialized television.
All-time favorite American books are:
The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton,
The Great
Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison, and
Good Morning
Midnight
by Jean Rhys. I rediscovered
Moby Dick
while writing
Manhattan Beach
. I listened
to it as an audiobook, and was utterly transported.
What kind of book do you plan to write next?
I’d like to write a companion volume to
A Visit from the Goon Squad
, following some of
its peripheral characters into new worlds. Now that my kids are teens, and don’t went to
spend every moment with me (to put it mildly), I’m hoping to pick up my publishing pace!
A MAP OF THE
BROOKLYN
NAVAL YARD
