It starts out like any other highbrow reading. Lights down low, jazz, a room full of chattering literati (some of them refusing to take off their fedoras). Then Egan and Popperwell walk out and…silence. We\u2019re meant to be clapping right? The audience are looking at one another but it\u2019s been quiet too long; we can\u2019t start now. Popperwell tries to begin but her pages are stuck together. Cue a minute of alternating apologies and what sounds like sticky back plastic being torn from a microphone. There are only so many rounds of nervous laughter in an audience\u2014we run out well before things are ready to go.<\/p>\n
And so, we putter into an introduction. Egan stands and, sensing the stiffness in the room, goes for flattery. Her first visit to Manchester is impressing her; the building we\u2019re in only comparable to the New York Public Library. We knew that already but it\u2019s always nice to hear it from someone else. The awkward spell lifts and we\u2019re into the reading.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s worth the wait. Heck, it\u2019s worth the seven year wait we\u2019ve had between 2010\u2019s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad<\/em> and this, her latest novel, Manhattan Beach<\/em>. <\/p>\n We\u2019re on the New York waterfront after the crash. Gangster territory. Anna Kerrigan is our pre-teen protagonist, tasked by her father with tying up the local mob boss\u2019 children and making him look good. Egan\u2019s linguistic ease is remarkable. From a housewife with a \u2018movie star\u2019s painted eyebrows\u2019 to the boss\u2019 grinning \u2018as if her reply were a ball he\u2019s taken physical pleasure in catching\u2019. A future Brooklyn Navy Yard worker in the war, Anna plays with a trainset and is described as feeling \u2018the logic of mechanical parts in her fingertips\u2019, coming so naturally that \u2018she could only think that other people didn\u2019t really try\u2019. I\u2019m hooked.<\/p>\n But more than all that, Egan achieves the impossible: a character says the word \u2018toots\u2019 and I believe it.<\/p>\n During the Q&A (Popperwell\u2019s sheets are now unstuck), we learn of the effort that went into writing the book, Egan\u2019s first historical novel. She\u2019s been at it for fifteen years, engaging in oral history projects in that time to capture the memories of the women and men who worked the wartime navy yard, those still alive now well into their nineties. We hear of the Byzantine way Egan goes about her writing process\u2014writing longhand, typing up, reading what\u2019s there, making seventy-odd page dossiers of notes, and all that\u2019s, in her own words, \u2018before even working out what the book\u2019s about\u2019. After that it\u2019s a rinse and repeat cycle of hard copy revisions, notes, outlines, etc. No wonder we\u2019ve waited so long.<\/p>\n The surety and eloquence of Egan\u2019s answers make it hard to judge the level of spontaneity we\u2019re getting. Is this the polish of the literary scene\u2014answers ground and honed on the festival circuit? Or are we getting something fresh\u2014are we seeing that sense of improvisation she tells us is so important in her writing? The purity of each thought has the whiff of the former but then again, as our host puts it, we\u2019re in the presence of a \u2018super-thinky writer\u2019.<\/p>\n Jennifer Egan, hosted by Katie Popperwell at the Manchester Central Library. It starts out like any other highbrow reading. Lights down low, jazz, a room full of chattering literati (some of them refusing to take off their fedoras). Then Egan and Popperwell walk out and…silence. We\u2019re meant to be clapping right? The audience are looking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[16,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nHenry Cockburn<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"