Jennifer Egan The great American novelist everybody’s reading

 

Jennifer 
Egan

The great American novelist everybody’s reading

Issue n° 4, Autumn & Winter 2011

Jennifer Egan’s latest novel, a satirical dissection of America’s decaying music industry, has won her this year’s Pulitzer Prize and put her name at the top of the bestseller lists. She’s a daring writer who’s brave enough to eschew the maxim about writing what you know (race, sexuality – she’ll go there); in fact, she’d rather write about men than herself.

Once upon a life: Jennifer Egan

One minute she was in the back of a Jaguar; the next she was spraying graffiti on San Francisco pavements. Author Jennifer Egan reflects on how Patti Smith's wild music rode roughshod into her high-school days

Jennifer Egan
Sunday 6 March 2011

T

here was a leader, of course. I'll call her V: a scholarship student at our private high school. She'd moved to San Francisco recently from Alaska, and lived with her mother in a small downtown apartment. V's mother was not like the mothers I'd grown up knowing: she was in her mid-30s, divorced, and worked full time.

One afternoon in the fall of our freshman year, I climbed with V to the roof of her apartment building and smoked my first joint in the cold punching mix of sun and fog that any San Franciscan knows in their bones. Then we went downstairs to V's apartment, where she slept on a mattress and box-spring in the living room by a window overlooking the bay. We listened to Patti Smith. V and her mother had Horses and the new album, Radio Ethiopia. I had never heard anything like the crooning, menacing wildness of that voice.

By the time I took the bus home, I felt like I'd crashed through a false bottom into real life. It was something I'd been debating: was reality the inside of my stepfather's Jaguar, where I sat with my little brother in the back seat during night rides home from downtown, Neil Diamond's Hot August Night playing on the tape deck? Or was it what I saw outside my window as we drove towards the Broadway Tunnel: hookers, strip clubs, addled sunburned hippies, spidery young people with chopped hair and ghostly skin who were clearly in extremis – orbed with a glow of duress even when they were laughing?

This was 1976.

At 14, I began a secret life. It tunnelled underneath my old one, which looked the same to the untrained eye, but was revealed, now, to be the insubstantial thing I'd always guessed. The entry point was V's apartment, where I went for weekend sleepovers, thus avoiding (for a while) the suspicions of my mother and stepfather. But brownie baking and late-night TV figured nowhere in these odysseys with V and L – another girl from our class who had joined us. I knew L from the girls' school where I'd gone until that year; she played the violin. She told outrageous lies with a straight face.

Our nights began with the taking of various drugs – pot, acid, mushrooms, Quaaludes, all of which we bought on the street – followed by prolonged nocturnal wandering: to the fancy Nob Hill hotels near V's apartment, whose halls and gilded bathrooms we haunted, then down a fall of hills to Ghirardelli Square and Fisherman's Wharf, where we bought ice cream and spied on tourists. When it got to be two or three in the morning, we unearthed our cans of spray paint and left hurried, cryptic scrawls over sidewalks and buildings. It felt important to leave our mark on the city. Once in a while, driving with my mother in daylight, I would see something V and L and I had written, and my stomach would do a little flip.

There was a soundtrack to all this: Patti Smith. After school, the three of us lay side by side on the greyish-white wall-to-wall carpeting in V's living room, and listened to Patti sing. We knew every note, every phrase; we sang along, and in the course of our school day, we muttered lines to each other:

"He merged perfectly. With the mirror. In the hallway."

"The boy looked at Johnny. Johnny wanted to run but the movie kept moving as planned…"

And so on, until Johnny is raped by the second boy, who may or may not be Johnny's own reflection, and a throng of imaginary horses is unleashed. Patti heaved up these horses from somewhere in her chest. She panted them out. She was doing more than singing – she was showing us a way to be in the world: fragile but tough, beautiful and ugly, corrupt and innocent.

I stopped combing my hair, let it tangle and frizz into a ratty mane like Patti's. I wore my stepfather's old shirts loosely tucked, unbuttoned to my breastbone like Patti in the famous Mapplethorpe photo. Like V and L, I put pen to paper as I listened, stoned, to Patti sing, trying my best to capture the monumental swerving of my brain. V and L were better at this. They expected to be famous and believed it of each other. L would be an artist, V a writer. But really, they would be rock stars, like Patti. I made no such claims, and no one made them for me.

After the school year ended, I exchanged feverish letters with V from Chicago, where I'd gone for my annual visit to my father and his new family. I spent my days volunteering at the day camp where my young half-siblings went, wondering if a letter from V would be waiting for me when I got back to my father's apartment. She wrote to me on construction paper, and enclosed shells and leaves and feathers. She'd lost her virginity to a man her mother brought home. She and L had briefly become lovers. I read with awe, with envy.

All this time, Patti Smith continued her ascent. We heard her on the radio and in stores and even in the Jaguar. In some mystical way, her rising popularity seemed to bode well for us, her girls, as if she could take us with her, lift us out of our lives into something better. And when it was announced she would come to San Francisco for a concert in the summer of 1978, we arranged to go together.

I don't remember if she sang "Land", our favourite song, with its stampede of imaginary horses. I want to think she didn't – it seems impossible that I could have forgotten that.

Here's what I do remember: we were close, almost directly in front of Patti, all three of us wearing hooded sweatshirts; we held hands and looked up; my gut disappointment at realising Patti didn't recognise us or even see us – that our years of devotion were lost on her; the miracle of her sheer proximity – seeing her alive, breathing, flicking sweat from her tangled hair – which finally washed away that initial disappointment; Patti wrapping herself in an American flag; becoming separated from V and L as the concert went on. At one point I noticed L holding a man from behind as she danced, her arms around his waist.

My thirst. It was something I barely noticed at first in the sweaty hall, but gradually it overpowered me, until my need for cold water crowded out everything else, even Patti Smith onstage, and made me wish for the concert to end. Would this be the last song? Would this? I prayed so. I fantasised about the feel of water in my mouth. That's my strongest memory of my night with Patti Smith: how thirsty I was. I can't remember ever being thirstier in my life.

L left with the man I'd seen her dancing with. The next day she would come to my house, trembling, and tell me she'd been gang raped. True or not? I wasn't sure. Within another year, I would watch her shoot heroin with a room full of punk rockers she'd moved in with, all of them sharing a needle, then nod off against my shoulder for an hour.

V and I left together. In my memory, fog is spinning in the cloud of fluorescent light outside the late-night corner market where we sprint to buy a gallon of orange juice. V is as thirsty as I am, it turns out. We pass the carton back and forth, gulping the cold sweet juice until it runs from our chins and soaks our T-shirts. We drink the whole thing, panting and gasping.

V will graduate from high school a year early, as planned. For her thesis, she'll write a book on Willa Cather, copying 200 pages by hand in a series of drafts. She and her mother will move back to Alaska, where V will get straight As through two years of college, six courses a semester, and then drop out. She'll become addicted to cocaine and finally get clean. In our late 20s, we'll lose track of each other.

But I don't want us to go our separate ways yet. I want to stand outside the corner market a while longer with V, surrounded by fog, the two of us holding our empty juice carton and talking about how it felt to see Patti Smith, how beautiful she looked, how strong she is and how we want to be like that, too, strong and fierce, how we want to do big things in our lives, like Patti. How we can feel it – the rest of our lives – coming up underneath us like a huge, unknowable shape. But I'm making this up – I don't remember what we said. I don't remember if I drove V home in my mother's boxy blue Fiat, or if we both took the bus. I don't remember if I could drive yet. I should know these things – I should remember everything. But when I push against the feeling of standing there with V, the moment blows away like the fog that may or may not have been out that night.

THE GUARDIAN

DRAGON
Top 10 holidays in fiction
The Top 10 Novels of 2017
Jennifer Egan / ‘I was never a hot, young writer. But then I had a quantum leap’

A Heroine for Our Times in Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach / Review

Once upon a life / Jennifer Egan

A Heroine for Our Times in Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach / Review

Review: A Heroine for Our Times in Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach

BY SARAH BEGLEY

OCTOBER 5, 2017

Jennifer Egan joined the who’s who of American letters in 2011 when she won a Pulitzer for A Visit From the Goon Squad, an interlinked-story-collection-as-novel that bucked more than a few conventions. Her new novel Manhattan Beach is more conventional in that it’s a linear, historical narrative set circa World War II. It’s a less inventive book, but many readers will find it more satisfying.

Manhattan Beach, named for the neighborhood in Brooklyn, begins when Anna Kerrigan is almost 12 years old, tagging along with her father to a mysterious man’s seaside home. Already there is a plucky danger about her. When the narrative shoots ahead seven or eight years, we find her at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, working along with the other wartime women to measure construction parts. Soon, she becomes the first female diver to repair ships. The work is risky and physically punishing, but also exhilarating: “like flying, like magic–like being inside a dream,” Anna thinks during her first dive. (Some of Egan’s descriptions of breathing under a 200-lb. suit are just as breathtaking for the reader.) But all is not so lovely: Anna’s father has abandoned the family, her mother is solely devoted to Anna’s severely disabled sister, and the mysterious man resurfaces in an unexpected way.Though the prose is exquisite, Egan never lets it get in the way of the story. In bouts of glamour, adventure and violence, she gives the narrative a cinematic feel, while grounding it in Anna’s realistic frustrations with society. She wants to be “a different kind of girl,” but not that kind of girl. Though “maybe those kinds of girls were simply girls who’d no one to tell them they were not those kinds of girls.”

Anna is indeed a different kind of girl. Though she is rooted in her historical setting, readers of today will find her story of daring and persistence deeply resonant.

TIME

DRAGON
Top 10 holidays in fiction
The Top 10 Novels of 2017
Jennifer Egan / ‘I was never a hot, young writer. But then I had a quantum leap’

A Heroine for Our Times in Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach / Review
Once upon a life / Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan 

Interview

Jennifer Egan: ‘I was never a hot, young writer. But then I had a quantum leap’

Six years after winning a Pulitzer with the ‘postmodern’ A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan reveals why she has now embraced traditional storytelling

Rachel Cooke
Sunday 24 September 2017

In interviews, Jennifer Egan used to spend a fair amount of time explaining what she wasn’t interested in doing with her writing. Verisimilitude was boring. The linear was “the weird scourge of writing prose”. Conventional narratives were absolutely not her bag. In the same conversations, she would sometimes refer to her time at the University of Pennsylvania, when she was “a literary theory nut”; such ideas, she insisted scarily, were with her still. All of which made it seem a safe bet that when she finally delivered a new book – it’s six years since the publication of her Pulitzer prize-winning fourth novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad, which came with a chapter in the form of a PowerPoint presentation – it would be every bit as formally daring as her last.

But, no. Reach for your smelling salts, Goon Squad fans. For her next trick, Egan has written a 400-page historical novel called Manhattan Beach. Set in New York during the Depression and the second world war – specifically, much of the action takes place in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, then the biggest builder and repairer of allied ships – it comes not only with a forward-moving plot, but with a thoroughly old-fashioned heroine: the kind of girl, brave and determined, with whom readers are almost duty bound to fall in love. A Victorian novel by any other name, its sensibility is, in other words, so thoroughly conventional, I can’t help but wonder: when, exactly, did its author start thinking verisimilitude and the linear might be interesting after all?

Egan laughs. “I’m thrilled you felt it was like a Victorian novel,” she says, speaking on Skype from her home in New York. “I’m obsessed with the Victorian novel. I can’t help it. I feel like the novel then was so powerful and agile in ways I’m not sure it is now.” That said, she isn’t entirely sure how much of a break Manhattan Beach – already longlisted for the National Book awards in the US – represents with her past. Yes, she longed for it to be different. Whenever she finishes a project, all she wants to do is “repudiate” it. However, those who like to describe her as a postmodernist seem sometimes to forget that there is nothing she has done in her novels that the Victorians didn’t do – “and that includes graphic kookiness”.

In any case, she didn’t begin by writing a regular kind of narrative. “At first, I was going to rip things up again,” she says. “I thought the book would connect to 9/11, which I felt was the end of something, or at least an important event in a trajectory that had begun with the rise of America as a superpower at the end of world war two, and so there would be these leaps into the future, ie into our present. But all that was dead on arrival. It was so stale. There’s nothing inherently exciting about any narrative move: it’s only exciting if it works, and if it couldn’t be done any other way. Everything else is gimmickry.”

When these leaps in time received a thumbs down from her writing group, she knew she had to let them go. “I finally admitted to myself I was sick of all that so-called innovation, and that it would be a relief to get rid of it.” Only then, a new problem: “To my horror, I found it was much harder to write a book in which I had to sustain momentum. With fragmentation [her approach in Goon Squad] you avoid a lot of writing pitfalls, the number one of which is sustaining momentum.”

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 Jennifer Egan: ‘After Trump’s inauguration, I found it almost impossible to work for a couple of weeks.’ Photograph: Pieter M Van Hattem

In her acknowledgments, Egan describes “circling” around Manhattan Beach’s setting over a period of years. There was a time when she wasn’t sure she could transform her research into a novel. That job seemed (she tells me this with the same modesty that has her insisting she was “over-rewarded” for Goon Squad) to be beyond her capabilities. “But I’ve learned there is a feeling I have about things that are going to end up in my fiction, a kind of excitement. I have this dream again and again: I find extra rooms in the place where I live. You could say it’s a very New York dream, but I think it’s about writing – the feeling that there is something behind a wall or a door. When I went on my first tour of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I had the sense that I was pushing through a wall. I was in a hidden city.”

Egan found her way to the source of her inspiration through old photographs. When she first moved to New York – she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, a theatre director, and two teenage sons – people had learned to look away from the water. But in these images, the city poured outwards towards its piers, its lifeblood. Having toured the navy yard with its archivist, and having learned of the daily miracles of engineering that were performed there – “such incredible feats, including two ships that were half destroyed being soldered together” – she fell in with a bunch of veteran army divers. “I attended one of their reunions in 2009, and they dressed me in the Mark V diving suit [the kind with a heavy, spherical metal helmet], all 200 pounds of it. Most of them had been in Korea or Vietnam, but there was one second world war veteran there. He had worked as a diver in Cherbourg, clearing out the harbour after the Germans blew everything up when they fled.”

In France, this man had come across a female Russian diver – a figure, almost mythological, who enthralled Egan. In the fullness of time, she would import the woman into her novel in the form of the heroine, Anna Kerrigan, the spirited daughter of a dancer from the Ziegfeld Follies. Not content merely with soldering and riveting – the war enabled women to take well-paid jobs previously done only by men – Anna would join that most dangerous and exclusive of navy occupations, becoming a diver. Did any women really dive for the US navy? “I don’t know that they didn’t,” says Egan. “But given that the navy would not even let African American men dive, it doesn’t seem likely.”

 

I just turned 55, and feel: wow! I’m lucky, in that I have always been able to make a living

Egan’s career as a writer – she first decided she wanted to be one in the 1980s, as a lonely backpacker in Europe – has an unusual shape. Her early novels were critically acclaimed and sold well; The Keep, her take on the gothic, was a bestseller. But starting out – she was first published in 1995 – she was somehow never pegged as “a hot, young writer”. This used to trouble her. Now, though, she’s grateful for it. “There’s something wonderful about the feeling that things continue to improve. I had a steady build and then [after the Pulitzer] a quantum leap. I just turned 55, and feel: wow! I’m also one of the lucky ones, in that I have always been able to make a living from it.” She combines fiction with long-form journalism (for the New York Times Magazine), and she doesn’t know where she would be, creatively, without it. “Fiction is my deepest love, but I love journalism, too. It keeps me thinking vigorously, and it reminds me that there is a world out there. It has taught me how to distil enormous quantities of information, and I wouldn’t have been able to write Manhattan Beachwithout that because I have never scuba dived. Actually, I’ve barely been on a ship.”

Acting on a hunch, I ask if she was relieved to have finished Manhattan Beachbefore the election of Trump. “Oh my God, you said it. Friends who are working on books set in contemporary times are trying to figure out how to account for him; he has a way of sucking all the air out of the room. After the inauguration, I found it almost impossible to work for a couple of weeks. All the existential problems that can crowd in on writers – questions like: what’s the point? – seemed very crushing at that moment.” The president is, however, having an effect on her reading. “I’m reading Trollope now,” she says, almost confidingly. “He’s little read here, but he makes for a great juxtaposition with Trump because he is all about power and money. Every character is introduced along with their annual income: people literally have a price tag on their head.” Thanks to this, Trump may yet turn out to be a cog in the engine of her next novel – which Egan, the so-called postmodernist, is thinking about setting in the 19th century. That surely must tell us something about where we are right now.

• Jennifer Egan is appearing at Sydney Writers festival 2018, held between 30 April - 6 May at Carriageworks.

• Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan will be published in the UK on 3 October (Little, Brown £16.99). 

THE GUARDIAN

DRAGON
Top 10 holidays in fiction
The Top 10 Novels of 2017
Jennifer Egan / ‘I was never a hot, young writer. But then I had a quantum leap’

A Heroine for Our Times in Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach / Review

Once upon a life / Jennifer Egan

Alex Preston’s best fiction of 2017

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Alex Preston’s best fiction of 2017

George Saunders’s moving Booker-winner lived up to his masterful short stories, Salman Rushdie turned his gaze on America, several debuts dazzled, and then there was Hollinghurst and Pullman…

Alex Preston
Sunday 3 December 2017

 

This was the year in which George Saunders – long recognised as one of the masters of the short story – took on the novel. Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury £18.99), set in a Washington cemetery over the course of one tragic night, was a worthy winner of the Man Booker. Focusing on Lincoln’s grief at the death of his beloved son, Willy, the story is narrated by the carnivalesque ghouls who inhabit the graveyard. It’s as wildly imaginative and profoundly moving as anything I’ve read for a long time. Joining Saunders on the shortlist was another Great American Novel, Paul Auster’s 4321 (Faber £20). While it wasn’t roundly praised by critics, it feels like the kind of book that will endure – so much of Auster’s extraordinary oeuvre comes together in this long and intricate tale, which manages to remain fresh and dazzlingly original.

Fiona Mozley

 (Hodder & Stoughton £10.99), was a surprise inclusion on the Man Booker shortlist, but it’s a cracking read. Darkly lyrical and full of violence, Mozley’s Yorkshire owes something to Ted Hughes, something to older, deeper folk tales and fables. She’s a name to watch. Another shortlisted book, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (Hamish Hamilton £14.99), casts a magical realist spell on the horrors of the migrant crisis, taking us into parallel worlds and through portals, the narrative strung between London, Greece and west‑coast America.

Two magnificent books missed the cut from longlist to shortlist on the Man Booker, but did find themselves on the Costa shortlist. Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (Bloomsbury £16.99), her seventh and best novel so far, is a retelling of Antigone set in a contemporary London riven with racial tensions. A heart-rending book that makes the political intensely, painfully personal. Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (4th Estate £14.99) confirms him as one of our best novelists. It’s haunting and peculiar, a book that continues to rattle around in your head long after you put it down. A series of brilliant BBC radio broadcasts have been spawned from the novel, and it was also shortlisted for the Goldsmiths prize.

Jennifer Egan, author of Manhattan Beach, ‘a book of epic sweep and ambition’. Photograph: Pieter M. Van Hattem

There were some superb novels that didn’t get picked up in the lottery of the literary prizes. Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach (Corsair £16.99) tells a story of Depression-era New York through the waters that swirl around it, dredging up forgotten tales of the city’s maritime past. This is a book of epic sweep and ambition whose heroine, Anna, diving beneath the waves, is a memorable figure. Egan’s work has always been difficult to pin down, playing tricks with narrative conventions and the reader’s expectations. This feels like her most approachable novel so far, in places as daring and unusual as A Visit from the Goon Squad but with more of a story and a heart.

Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land (Little, Brown £16.99) is a knuckle-gnawing novel of marriage, money and country life. Witty, vicious, dark and unsettling, it’s a book that has finally propelled Craig to her rightful place at the top table of contemporary novelists. It manages at once to be blackly funny, deeply touching and full of edge-of-your-seat suspense. I’m not sure I’d read it straight after The Lie of the Land, but Katie Kitamura’s A Separation (Profile £12.99) presents a similarly bleak vision of married life. About the absences that lie at the heart of even the closest relationships, this novel matches its desolate subject matter with luminous, lapidary writing.

Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House is a ‘vivid and convincing’ portrait of contemporary America. Photograph: Rajanish Kakade/AP

If you’re looking for something a little more upbeat, Elizabeth Day’s The Party (4th Estate £12.99) starts off jolly enough – a group of well-heeled friends gathering for a 40th birthday celebration. Things sour quickly, though, and amid the champagne and cocaine the plot builds towards an almighty twist. Offering a nice transatlantic counterpoint to Day’s novel is Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House (Jonathan Cape £18.99), the tale of an immigrant family on the make in Obama’s America. Carrying whispers of The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Godfather, but still brilliantly, inimitably, a Rushdie novel, it’s one of the most vivid and convincing portraits of contemporary America I’ve read.

A new Alan Hollinghurst novel is always something to celebrate, but The Sparsholt Affair is a particularly joyful thing

There were a host of fine debut novels this year, not least among them Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile (Wrecking Ball £12) by Adelle Stripe. The fictionalised story of the short life of playwright Andrea Dunbar, it’s a beautiful period piece of 1980s Britain, as funny and sad as anything by Dunbar herself. Elif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot (Jonathan Cape £16.99), delighted me every bit as much as her earlier nonfiction book about Russian literature, The Possessed (2010). Her young Turkish heroine, Selin, manages to be both very clever and entirely naive. It’s worth searching out American War (Picador £14.99) by Omar El Akkad. Future dystopias always tell us a great deal about our most pressing contemporary anxieties and this is a novel that imagines the cracks currently emerging in US society widening into ravines. Also in translation (by Megan McDowell), Samanta Schweblin’s nightmarish Fever Dream (Oneworld £12.99) is a book to read in one frantic sitting – bold, uncanny and utterly gripping.

Finally, two books that ought to be on every prize shortlist next year. A new Alan Hollinghurst novel is always something to celebrate, but the sumptuous The Sparsholt Affair (Picador £20) is a particularly joyful thing. Funnier and lighter in touch than 2011’s The Stranger’s Child, but sharing many of its predecessor’s concerns about the passing of time and literary posterity, it’s hard to imagine anyone not loving this novel. The same might be said of La Belle Sauvage (David Fickling £20), Philip Pullman’s first book in his The Book of Dust trilogy. It’s a stunningly good read and shows that truly great literature renders questions of genre meaningless – this is not just a masterpiece of children’s fiction, it’s a masterpiece, full stop.

• This article was amended on 4 December 2017. It’s the French edition of American War by Omar El Akkad that is translated by Laurent Barucq; the original is published in English

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