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.

“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. “At first, I was going to rip things up again,” she says. In any case, she didn’t begin by writing a regular kind of narrative. 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”.

Whenever she finishes a project, all she wants to do is “repudiate” 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. “I’m thrilled you felt it was like a Victorian novel,” she says, speaking on Skype from her home in New York. 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?Įgan laughs. 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. For her next trick, Egan has written a 400-page historical novel called Manhattan Beach. Reach for your smelling salts, Goon Squad fans. 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.īut, no. 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. Conventional narratives were absolutely not her bag. The linear was “the weird scourge of writing prose”. I n interviews, Jennifer Egan used to spend a fair amount of time explaining what she wasn’t interested in doing with her writing.

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