Diving Off the Shore of Convention: Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach - Drucilla Cornell

BOOK REVIEW

Regional Labor Review (Spring/Summer 2018)

Diving Off the Shore of Convention: Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach Manhattan Beach, by Jennifer Egan. New York: Scribner, 438 pp., 2017 Reviewed by Drucilla Cornell

Jennifer Egan’s latest novel Manhattan Beach is a tour de force. On the one hand, it is a historical novel about one of the crucial periods of history of the United States, the years when the country lurched from the Great Depression into World War II. It takes place at a time when there are few jobs and people are still scrambling for a living. The piers and the harbors of New York City are bereft of ships and work for longshoremen. Eddie Kerrigan, the father of Anna Kerrigan, one of the two main characters, has become a bagman for a union official who continues to survive by organizing whatever work is left on the piers, with a foot in some of the less legitimate professions including gambling and boxing. The novel moves back and forth between two perspectives, those of Anna Kerrigan and Dexter Styles, a gangster with both legitimate and illegitimate businesses who runs nightclubs, gambling parlors, and who initially made his money out of prohibition by selling alcohol illegally. He enters the shadowy world of one of our great American myths, that of a gangster with a good heart, at the early age of sixteen.

The novel operates on a number of levels, which is what makes it so rich and provocative. On the one hand, Dexter Styles actually lives on Manhattan Beach on the edge of southern Brooklyn. But the sea is a metaphor throughout the novel, not surprisingly given that in American literature from Moby Dick on, the sea represents the grandeur of something utterly beyond us small finite human beings, but which is also opaque in a certain sense, never fully illuminated by the humans that move into her waters. And yet in her very darkness and otherness the sea provides an openness to a daring that makes transformation possible. Immersion in the waters is a literal life story in the case of Anna Kerrigan, who during WWII and after becomes a diver who works on military ships, one of the most dangerous and difficult jobs of ship repair. Imagine being a woman who weighs about 120 lbs. being dressed in a 200-pound diving suit in which even walking on land successfully and enduring the claustrophobia of the masks are extraordinary acts. As the novel tells us many men could not endure the claustrophobia. Every aspect of the dive has to be perfect or the divers would lose his or her life, which is why there are tenders. And of course, at the time of the novel the divers were almost exclusively men.

So, to dive and to try to work at the same time is to put yourself at risk and in the hands of the tenders who guide you and who are your only connection to the surface.

So as with the sea, diving is both Anna’s own story at a time when women simply did not have the opportunity to be divers and what she went through to become one, and a metaphor for the kind of daring that makes individual transformation possible. In a time when so many novels are cynical about what human beings can be, Manhattan Beach is ultimately a story about transformation, hope, courage, and love. But given that this review is for a New York-based labor review, I want to start with Anna Kerrigan’s story, and then I will turn to Egan’s unconventional presentation of the figure of the gangster.

Anna

We meet Anna Kerrigan as she and her father first encounter Dexter Styles in his capacity as a bagman for the union. Kerrigan is portrayed in her unconventional femininity from the beginning of the novel. She is supposed to be playing with the children of Style’s family, including his daughter Tabatha and her two twin brothers while the men talk business. Anna already intuits that this man Dexter Styles is important to her family’s wellbeing which includes not only herself and her mother but also her sister Lydia who was oxygen- deprived at birth and who has never lived a life as anything that we think of as a functioning human being. She cannot walk or speak but the family treats her as fully human, includes her in all activities and refuses to let anyone put her in a home. We only find out much later that Eddie Kerrigan becomes Styles’ employee in part at least to provide Lydia with the very expensive wheelchair that she needs even to sit up. Styles’ house is right on the water. It is part of Styles showing that he is now a wealthy man with excellent family ties and therefore can live by the water. But Styles himself seems drawn to the sea. In part, the opening scene is to contrast two views of the sea: Anna’s relationship to the sea and Tabatha’s. Anna takes her shoes off and lets her feet sink into the ocean even though it is freezing cold and Styles is admiring of her daring and courage. From the beginning of the novel Anna has a powerful but of course not fully understood attraction to Styles.

Some years later Eddie Kerrigan simply disappears and Agnes Kerrigan, Anna’s mother, returns home to her farm with her family. But by that time Anna has already left her conventional “female job” as a parts inspector in the Brooklyn Navy Yard to become a diver and is too committed to her new job to follow her mother. Much has already been written about the role of Rosie the Riveters in WWII when women took heavy industrial jobs that they had never been able to dream of, let alone become regularly employed in. If this novel were nothing other than Anna’s story as a diver it would be well worth the reader’s effort to follow her struggle.

To dive and to work on a giant ship wearing a 200-pound suit is something that Lieutenant Axel, her boss, simply would have thought to be impossible for a woman, but she will not be defeated. She passes test after test and Lieutenant Axel still refuses to give her any serious diving work, even while others of the men fail miserably at their job as divers and actually injure themselves.

As incompetence and injury thin out the workforce, Anna is finally assigned the job of a diver that simply requires she dive down and diagnose the problem with the ship and then send a man down to fix it. But instead she breaks all the rules and fixes it herself, to the rage of Lieutenant Axel. There is one African American diver amongst her original crew and Egan writes how they stayed away from one another, knowing they were the hardcore outsiders. To quote Egan, “and so the estrangement they had in common estranged them doubly from one another.” (p. 213). But ultimately, this divide is crossed when Marle, the African American crew member, and Bascombe, who served as her tenders on the fateful day that she broke all the rules become friends. Indeed, it is Bascombe who has been trying to get into the Navy forever who gets his fiancé to include Marle and Anna at the regular gatherings at the bars that the divers frequent after a day of very hard and daring work. The description of the actual labor of a diver is well researched and certainly gives the reader a good idea of how difficult that line of work is. Even Lieutenant Axel ultimately changes his mind about Anna without even seeming to recognize the horrific sexist behavior he had exposed her to when he asked her to train a new group of divers. Anna even gets written up at the newspaper for her excellent work as a diver. The description of the sexism that Anna has to endure and her determination to withstand it would make this a feminist novel, but the emphasis for Egan is always on individual transformation even as Anna is consistently portrayed as a woman who insists on carving out her own identity.

Anna claims her own sexuality by losing her virginity at the age of fourteen and later by deciding to become a single mother at a time when few made such decisions. At first, she is convinced that her activities as a diver will end her pregnancy, but no such luck. She then turns to her friend Nell who has been living a much more conventional single female life, as a mistress to a wealthy man. Nell arranges an illegal abortion, and of course all abortions were illegal at that time and doctors were putting themselves at risk to even undertake them.

But money has its way around the law and Nell and Anna go together to have Anna’s abortion. At the crucial moment when she is about to go under she has a vision of her younger sister and decides at the last minute to keep the child. Her only options then seemed to be giving the baby up, or arranging some sort of artificial marriage with a gay man. But instead, the intergenerational friendship with her seemingly wayward aunt provided the alternative that neither of them had initially thought possible. In a time of war many women lost their husbands overseas, she decided to feign to be a widow, work as a diver, and raise her child with her aunt, who herself finds a whole new life as the primary caretaker of the baby. Lieutenant Axel will ultimately help her get a job in the postwar world once she decides to keep her baby and move to California. Of course, he never knows she is pregnant.

Dexter Styles

The other main character from whose perspective the story is presented is Dexter Styles. He is a gangster with a heart who has married into the wealthy family of Arthur Berringer who gives consent for him to marry his

daughter on the condition that he promises to be monogamous. In fact, he strays twice, once with a woman on a train and for the second time with Anna Kerrigan. But both times he realizes he has betrayed his father-in-law who certainly in the novel represents the connection between so-called legitimate business and the shadowy world of illegal business. Indeed, Eddie Kerrigan’s boss is himself murdered. And as work became scarcer and scarcer, many union officials themselves survived hard times by allying themselves with the underworld of gangsters so that they would have access to violence and power beyond the ever-weakening unions in the face of heightened employer resistance and unemployment. Styles’ life is that of a well-off man with a beautiful socialite for a wife, and three children. Most of his businesses are nightclubs and of course in the back room are gambling, prostitution, etc. Styles oversees this empire bus does not participate in these activities aside from his two instances of adultery and indeed lives a somewhat conventional life of a straight white male. He also is known uniquely for having sympathies for the misfortunes of others and deeply regrets any violent action that he must take.

Anna Kerrigan has always suspected that Styles had played an important role in her family and may even know what had happened to her father and perhaps that that was the basis of her own strong attraction to him. Indeed, Styles and Anna have a passionate one-night stand which leads Anna to finally confess to him who she is and to ask him what had happened to her father. I won’t give the mystery away but let me just say that Styles acts in typical unconventional gangster fashion. I say typical because when Anna asks Styles to take her sister to the beach so that she could see the sea, Styles agrees and actually makes sure that her sister gets close enough to the ocean to feel it. After their passionate one-nighter, Anna demands to know if her father is dead and Styles says yes and that he will take her to where she can find her father’s body. Indeed, he does so, but in order to get there she had to dive and asked her new friends Bascombe and Merle to act as tenders for her. Again, I won’t give the mystery away but Styles, against the advice of both Bascombe and Marle, decides that he himself will dive with absolutely no diving experience. He manages to survive and here we are returned to the central metaphor of the novel: diving. For whatever happened to Eddie Kerrigan, Styles knows that it is something he can never escape and in the depths of the sea there is an illumination, an illumination that inspires him to go straight and that will ultimately lead to his death.

Diving

The metaphor of diving is that when we sink into the darkness of the ocean, the completely unknown, a darkness and an otherness that is unimaginable, we risk ourselves such that we are open to other possibilities of who we might be. That happens not only to Anna but also to Styles. It is Anna’s determination to carve out her own life as a woman who lives in her own way that leads her to become a diver, but it is that work and her success at it that gives her courage to live her life with her aunt as a single mother. In Styles’ case, the very man

who led her to where her father had supposedly decomposed in the depths of the waters, sees himself differently and wants to go straight. The risk involved in diving into the depths of what we don’t know about ourselves and others is what leads both these protagonists to have profound moments of transformation. The use of the metaphor of diving allows us to see the world of the Great Depression and WWII from the two seemingly different perspectives of Dexter Styles and Anna Kerrigan who are intertwined through the role of Eddie Kerrigan as an employee of Styles.

And what happened to Eddie Kerrigan and why? You will have to read the novel to find out. Even the minor characters like Agnes Kerrigan and Brianne Kerrigan have major transformative experiences which lead them to make decisions which they never thought possible. Agnes signs up to be a nurse for the Red Cross and travels to Europe during the war and Brianne becomes the caretaker of Anna’s baby Leon once they have moved to San Francisco together.

The novel is about a time in U.S. history when the country was not the imperial power that we are now, but was on the verge of becoming it. The description of the docks, the laborers, the situation of workers, and the struggle of the union makes this an important book for the readers interested in work, working people and New York labor history. But equally important are the two metaphors of the sea and diving. Egan is a Pulitzer-Prizewinning novelist, not a preacher. It is through her characters that we begin to search in ourselves as to whether we would have the courage to dive into the sea beyond us, and the challenges this brings us reminds us not only of our finitude but also in our courage to change and to understand each other differently. Race, class, and gender are intertwined throughout. It is through the relationship of working together as divers that Bascombe and Marle and Anna become friends and remain so throughout the novel. Style never refers to Marle as anything other than “the Negro” and so the history of racism is woven in throughout the story, even though it is told by a white man and a white woman. Indeed, without revealing what happened to Eddie Kerrigan, there too a white man and a man from Nigeria become friends as they survive in struggle with the magnificence and terror of the sea.

If there is a weakness in the novel it is the character of Eddie Kerrigan, who first seems to be a happy family man even as his luck has turned down in the depression, and who ends up as an employee of Styles who he well knows is a gangster despite some of his legitimate interests. He seems a loving father both to Anna and to Lydia. Indeed Anna is his sidekick on many of his trips. But despite his seeming devotion to both daughters, we do not know why Eddie made the drastic decision that he did, a decision that was sure to bring the wrath of the syndicate on his head. A decision of the sort that Eddie Kerrigan made would inevitably lead to his murder.

Again, I will not leak to the reader what this decision is but there is no build up as to why Eddie would put not only himself but his entire family at risk. Yet the character of Eddie Kerrigan is at the heart of the unfolding of the novel including Anna’s tie and attraction to Dexter Styles which is seemingly mutual. Some of Eddie’s decisions seem to come out of nowhere and do not flow from what we are told about his character. However, the strengths of the book far outweigh its weaknesses.

It is a book that reminds us that the courage to risk the unknown is also part of how we reach out to each other across boundaries that seem as insurmountable as race and gender did in the late 1930s. In my mind Anna will always be remembered as one of the great feminist characters as she insists on being a woman in her own way and on her own terms. The last line of the book is “here it comes” as the fog rolls in as a tidal wave on San Francisco Bay. The fog which Egan uses as a metaphor for the sea describes its power and reminds us that we can never know the future. We have to be able to face the unknown as the fog covers the landscape. We cannot necessarily see our way forward, but the courage to withstand the unknown is what the metaphor of the fog as a tidal wave points us to. Anna’s courage remains undiminished even after all of her trials as a diver and as a woman. _______________________________ Drucilla Cornell is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Rutgers University; Visiting Professor at the University of Venda, South Africa; and a visiting professor at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her most recent book is The Spirit of Revolution: Beyond the Dead Ends of Man. REGIONAL LABOR REVIEW, vol. 20, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2018). © 2018 Center for the Study of Labor and Democracy, Hofstra University