Jennifer Egan – Manhattan Beach

Corsair / Scribner

“Beneath the exciting plot and readable prose, Egan is still examining the modes and consequences of power in the United States. As such, Manhattan Beach is the introduction to the Look At Me‘s conclusion, the two texts book-ending an American fantasy which opened and closed in war.”

REVIEW

Steve Erickson – Shadowbahn

Blue Rider Press

“In Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn, the Twin Towers return, fully formed, in the middle of the Dakota Badlands. Thousands are drawn to this “American Stonehenge,” and rumours start of a figure on the upper floors. This person, we find out, is Jesse Presley, the stillborn twin of Elvis—a man with no singing voice haunted by the spectre of his brother, and the memory of a parallel America where Elvis was never born. Growing increasingly strange, the dream-like novel charts the movement of several characters through this world, where a second reality impinges on our own, as though the line between two dimensions has grown porous, slowly melding into one.” (Taken from our review of Protomartyr’s Relatives In Descent).

Ottessa Moshfegh – Homesick for Another World

Jonathan Cape

“I don’t know what they teach you in Utah,” warns an elderly gossip column writer in one of the stories from Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World, “but even Jesus would get greedy here.” Similarly black and bleak, the entire collection is built on characters who, in one way or another, are reaching a point of unbearable tension within their current state. From the alcoholic, grade-fudging teacher of opener ‘Bettering Myself’ to the wannabee actor and  of ‘The Weirdos’, the people here are somehow jarred slightly out of reality, lost within the only world they know, or reaching a fatal point of self-destruction—exploding in some great flash of light or disintegrating into dust and shifted high on the wind. Consistently funny and sad and interesting, Homesick cements Moshfegh’s position as one of the best writers plying their trade right now.

Gabe Habash – Stephen Florida

Coffee House Press

Stephen Florida follows the final year of a lonely young wrestler in a North Dakota college, the last chance to achieve his dream of winning the Division IV NCAA Championship. Evoking the likes of DeLillo‘s Logos College and Wallace’s Enfield Tennis Academy, the college is a paradoxical blend of logic and madness, the ascetic athletic routine straining around the neurotic inner lives of the athletes, the competition between the boys blossoming into obsession and violence. Florida himself is either the ultimate unreliable narrator, or the most reliable narrator literature has ever seen, sucking us into his strange life and having us root for him, no matter how futile we both realise the quest to be.

Chavisa Woods – Things To Do When You’re a Goth in the Country

Seven Stories Press

“The stories are a reminder that despite much of the bluster and bravado it presents internationally, America is a dense mosaic of misfits, many of whom are trapped in damaging cycles by powers beyond their control. Whether dealing with war, drugs, queer relationships or, well… being a goth in the country, Chavisa Woods achieves a tone that’s simultaneously streetwise and sympathetic, and is exactly the kind of fiction we’re going to need to get us through currents times.”

REVIEW

Daniel Magariel – One of the Boys

Granta

Short, sharp and striking, Magariel’s debut One of the Boys blends sensitivity and ferocity to explore the relationship between two young boys and their abusive father. Fleeing their mother (inventing stories of maltreatment to gain custody), the volatile dad drives his sons to Albuquerque, promising a tight-knit relationship and a better life. But instead he slowly descends into the nadir of addiction, leaving the brothers to navigate the complexities of adult life alone, learning the importance of the unsaid, the truth behind closed doors.

Joseph Scapellato – Big Lonesome

Mariner Books

“Here, times gone are both something to escape and retreat into, to remember and forget, questions and answers and warnings all rolled into one. They come with lessons we’d do well to learn, expectations we’d do well to ignore. Ultimately, Big Lonesome paints the past as something that can destroy us, and as something that could save our souls.”

REVIEW

Omar El Akkad – American War

Picador / Knopf

“For all of its futuristic flourishes, this war could be any number of places from the past fifty years. The refugee camps, the suicide bombers, the baseless incarceration and torture. The distant foreign concern, the malicious intervention. The self-perpetuating violence. Angry young people killing angry young people, creating more angry young people. So, beneath the YA-style coming-of-age plot and sci-fi dressing, the novel is a study of radicalisation, of finding identity and purpose within chaos through unflinching world views and gestures of loyalty.”

REVIEW

George Saunders – Lincoln in the Bardo

Bloomsbury

“The majority of the action takes place in a state of existence between life and whatever comes next. The space is laid over our own, the spirits that inhabit it able to see the real world and pass across it, but unable to successfully interact with anything tangible, or communicate with anyone living. The result is a frustrating and confusing isolation, where words can be voiced but not heard, gestured made but never quite received. They are, therefore, left as bewildered viewers of the living, incapable of altering their paths and decisions, and wondering when, if ever, something might change.” (Taken from our review of Friendship’s Shock out of Season).

Nathan Hill – The Nix

Picador

“Hill is dedicated to the Wallacean endeavor of sincerity while simultaneously warning of the dangers that arise from a complete suspension of skepticism and irony. The Nix enacts a constantly revolving committal to criticism and skepticism coupled with attempts at understanding and empathy, a perpetual readjustment of the scales so that neither irony nor sincerity can gain detrimental prevalence.” (From a piece for Critique).

 Chanelle Benz – The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead

Ecco

The debut collection of stories by Chanelle Benz, The Man Who Shot Out My Eye is Dead stretches across eras, places and styles to become one of the most diverse and wide-ranging books of the year. From Western bank hold-ups and contemporary wanderers to Middle Eastern subterfuge and a metafictional pastiche/parody of Gothic romance classics, the structure, tone and content veers from piece to piece, leaving it unclear quite where Benz’s true voice will settle, but offering a handful of viable avenues for the future.

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It was a surprise, then, to hear that Egan’s latest novel, Manhattan Beach, was a historical work without much in the way of genre-bending style. Pitched somewhere between crime-noir and domestic novel, the book follows the life of Anna Kerrigan, a girl growing up out of Depression-era New York into a war-time city where women are employed in the naval yard. This novel situation, coupled with Anna’s relationship with her disabled sister, worn-out mother and, most importantly, mysteriously absent and potentially mob-involved father, drives a narrative capable of straddling interior life with more genre-based features, with detective elements of urban thrillers and the rich research of historical fictional. However, while Anna finds herself spread across a range of scenes—family homes, docklands, nightclubs, crime dens—all are tied together by various forms of deceit and deception.

The opening scene finds a pre-teen Anna in the early 1930s, travelling with her father Eddie on one of his ‘work’ business trips, which appear to cast him as a kind of bagman for organised crime. From there, the narrative jumps to the 40s, to a Kerrigan household abandoned by Eddie with no explanation, and Anna working toward the war effort. Slowly, we learn that almost every character has secrets, with Anna more than most. Indeed, it is almost as though she has been conditioned by her father to lie, to occupy a slippery space whenever questions are asked, as though to mislead others is a vital part of self-preservation, a habit done often enough to become instinctive.

To say anymore risks spoiling the book, be it one based on clues and red herrings and mistaken identity. However, it bears saying that fans of Goon Squad and Look At Me, that is, readers expecting something more than glorified pulp noir from a writer such as Egan, should not be so quick to judge. The so-called ‘standard’ narrative not only contains enough signals—implicit communications, miscommunications, passive aggressions—to warrant deep investigative reading, but Egan uses both the character and setting to explore wider themes of American identity. The many-headed monster of organised crime proves a useful vehicle for such examinations, with the characters who find themselves roped into criminal systems not only justifying their involvement, but partaking in various means to obscure the fact, to conceal the truth of their crimes (from others and themselves) to the degree that their actions become abstract and ethically vague. This is just another example of the key theme of deception. Characters lying to shape their identity and gain some degree of agency. Some semblance of freedom. Be it from poverty, or preconceptions and reputation—essentially the forces of the prevailing system.

Jennifer Egan has long detailed an America heading toward some sort of saturation point, where consumerist culture and image-obsessed ideology would soon reach a critical, apocalyptic mass. While the closing segments of Goon Squad suggest a runaway escalation of technology, the tone and timing of Look At Me make 9/11 a kind of extra-narrative denouement. The American Dream, Egan seems to say, is collapsing into clouds of dust—America attacked and wounded, New York City at war—as though some falsehood has been revealed at its no longer impenetrable core. While it would be naive to say that Manhattan Beach traces back to the origin of this Dream, the novel portrays an America ready to inflate it, to display it to the wider world as an opportunity or promise more seductive than any other.

“I see the rise of this country to a height no country has occupied, ever […] Because our dominance won’t arise from subjugating peoples. We’ll emerge from this war victorious and unscathed, and become bankers to the world. We’ll export our dreams, our language, our culture, our way of life. And it will prove irresistible.”

Beneath the exciting plot and readable prose, Egan is still examining the modes and consequences of power in the United States. As such, Manhattan Beach is the introduction to the Look At Me‘s conclusion, the texts book-ending an American fantasy which opened and closed in war.

Manhattan Beach is out now via Corsair (UK) and Scribner (US).

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