They all examine the way disasters - a drowning, a disfiguring accident, a botched prank - split characters' lives in half, creating gulfs between their early identities and the unrecognizable people they become. traditional spectrum, they all toy with time. Her books are also construction-conscious: Her Pulitzer-winning 2010 novel A Visit From The Goon Squad is designed to read like a collection of loosely related short stories, while 2006's The Keep is simultaneously about a fractured relationship, and the prison inmate telling the story in a creative-writing class.īut no matter where her books fall on the postmodern vs. Her individual short stories often play with form - like "Black Box," constructed from tweet-length field instructions, or "Great Rock and Roll Pauses," told via PowerPoint slides. How?īy now, fans of Jennifer Egan's writing know not to expect straightforward narratives.
Your purchase helps support NPR programming. She’s particularly good in suggesting how a family’s lovingly warm embrace can also smother and kill.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Manhattan Beach Author Jennifer Egan While Anna’s experience is unique to her as a young woman in a highly moralistic society, Egan suggests parallels to the ways in which major characters like her father and Dexter, as well as minor characters like her aunt and her mother, are similarly trapped. That, after all, is what others have been doing to Anna all her life. These narrative holes are deliberate Egan won’t let her heroine be pinned down and classified.
We don’t always know what makes her tick or why she chooses - often spontaneously and desperately - as she does. Trapped within a world they never made, their consequent rebellion leaves them spent and empty repeatedly lying to escape expectations and fashion new selves, they often lose sight of who they are or were.Īlong the way, we occasionally lose sight of Anna hiding from those around her, she also hides from us. Strong-willed and determined, she wins the brass over and plumbs a darkness she’d never known, much as Egan gives us a tour of the darkness Anna hides within - all while cultivating an image as a good girl, “impervious to the vices around her.”Įgan’s novels include many similar young women, straying beyond conventional expectations and limitations while nevertheless feeling shame after breaking the rules. Little wonder that Anna decides to become a diver, despite a Navy hierarchy that has no use for women in such dangerous roles.
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