![]() ![]() Anna, of course, knows none of this, and the scene is written with the watchfulness of a young girl. But Eddie is angling for a new job: he needs money to pay for a wheelchair for Anna’s sister Lydia, who is severely disabled. Now he’s working “at subsistence wages” as a bag man for Dunellen, a corrupt union official and old friend. A former stockbroker, Eddie hit hard times during the Depression. In the vivid opening set piece, 11-year-old Anna Kerrigan accompanies her father Eddie to visit a charming mobster named Dexter Styles at his house in Manhattan Beach. ![]() ![]() But this novel is also metaphysical in nature: Egan’s characters are transformed by the vast ocean around them, which both hides and reveals. Here, she places her characters in situations that permit trenchant cultural observations, writing revealingly about the challenges of coming of age in the middle of the American century, when women’s lives were substantially circumscribed. As a novelist, Egan possesses an unusual mix of qualities, combining a powerful social realism with poetic resonances that derive from her precise imagery and her fascination with the limitations of language. ![]()
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