A lot of people first heard the name Jennifer Egan when her innovative book “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” which contained a chapter written as a teen-ager’s PowerPoint presentation, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 2011. But Egan was no overnight success: Goon Squad was her fourth novel—if it was a novel—and she published her first story in The New Yorker nearly thirty years ago. But she’s kept experimenting since then, and a few years ago she wrote a short story entirely in tweets, called “Black Box.”
Compared to that, Egan’s new novel, “Manhattan Beach,” is “more of an escapist book,” she tells David Remnick. It starts during the Depression, and it’s about a girl who goes to work in a shipbuilding yard in Brooklyn during the Second World War. It involves false identities, a possible murder, and the mob—an old-fashioned page turner. It also reflects her ethnic identity as an Irish-American, and her grandfather’s life in the Chicago police. But that didn’t make it any easier to write. Putting out a novel, Egan finds, is murder no matter how you slice it.