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