You need the research, but you need something more

Jennifer Egan does something very, very difficult and makes it look easy in her novel Manhattan Beach. She does a ton of research and almost never rubs the reader's face in it.

Egan was born in 1962. Manhattan Beach begins in the late 1920s and ends in 1944. So she has no personal experience of the New York waterfront during the 1930s and 40s, New York nightlife during the period, the Brooklyn Navy Yard when it was building, among other ships, the battleship Missouri.

What she has is the story of Anna Kerrigan, a young woman who becomes the first civilian diver in the Navy Yard; her father Eddie Kerrigan, a bagman for a corrupt union official who abruptly disappears from Anna's life; and Dexter Styles, a nightclub owner who straddles the world of the Mafia and legitimate Wall Street banking. The book is written from the three very different points of view as the reader follows the story's threads.

The book begins with Eddie bringing his 11-year-old daughter Anna to Dexter's palatial Manhattan Beach home. Eddie has a proposition for Dexter, an arrangement that has a profound impact on both their lives. By the time Anna is 19, Eddie has vanished without a word to his daughter or his wife. It leaves a hole in Anna's life that she tries to fill by connecting with Dexter, the man her father had met when she was eleven.

Manhattan Beach is an extremely rich book. Rich in character, rich in place, rich in atmosphere, and—something you realize only toward the end—rich in plot. What happens to Anna, Eddie, and Dexter rewards and satisfies. I plan to read it again to see if I can see how she does it. You need the research, but you need something more, and whatever it is, Egan's got it.