Manhattan Beach

Jennifer Egan offers another very interesting novel.  This time looking at New York during WWII with emphasis on the US Naval Yard and the people who worked on the ships, both builders and divers.  Also exploring the underground mob and gangsters of the era. 

Egan tells the story of Anna and her family.  Growing up with a father who work world she did not understand and a mother who had devoted her life to Lydia, Anna's sick sister, we follow Anna as she becomes an adult and tries to make sense of all the unknowns in her world.  Her father disappears when she is a preteen, now as diver at the Navel Yard, Anna decides to piece together her memories and try to find out what happened to him.

Told through the eyes of Anna as she goes from being a naive young girl growing up in a small apartment with her parents and sister to being a young woman negotiating war work and how to socialize in the world, her father, Eddie Kerrigan, who is caught up working for the mob before he disappears and joins the merchant marines, and Dexter Styles, a mob boss, who employed Eddie and who Anna recognizes as someone who can help her in search for her missing father.

Alternating chapters present a time in history from a very different angle.  All the characters are drawn to the water and boats.  Working on boats at the naval yard, sailing on warships, or just living at Manhattan Beach watching ocean liners and warships through binoculars from the beach outside the house.  Each character is connected to the sea, even Anna's sister, Lydia, who is brain-damaged and was paralyzed at birth is temporarily reawakened at the beach.

Each of us has secrets we do not share and those secrets keep us from understanding others.  They weigh us down like the weight of a diver's suit or the heaviness of lifting a paralyzed child.  This is a book of secrets, regrets and trying to make the best of life in a world of unknowns.