When she first met and married Eddie, Agnes danced with the Follies.

The Kerrigan family has seen better days. Anna Kerrigan, the heroine of Manhattan Beach, is a descendant of Francie Nolan, as is her family dynamic: she is closer to her father Eddie than her mother Agnes, and admires him for his efforts to keep the family in some semblance of comfort during the Great Depression. ( Sex and the City doesn’t count.) Betty Smith’s neat, crushing prose prioritizes the internal life of Francie Nolan, a humble Irish girl grappling with a charming father who goes to an early grave, and a mother who prefers Francie’s robust brother to her.īeneath the catastrophes, the crush of human traffic and the rumble of the subway, Jennifer Egan has found the quiet melody of a young woman’s New York. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is the rare dazzling female vantage point, written by a woman, on life in the world’s greatest city. There exist countless novels about boys and men in New York: Jonathans Ames, Lethem, and Safran Foer have practically built careers out of it. Every moment of my newfound freedom was intoxicating: the thrum of millions of pairs of feet echoing with mine, the luxury of walking up to the Mid-Manhattan branch of the library.

Chinatown, the Upper West Side, Flushing, Coney Island, Rockaway Beach, McCarren Park. I went everywhere, at all hours of day and night, by myself. My pride at finally residing in my spiritual home was unfettered. I was 17, a freshman at New York University. ALMOST EXACTLY nine years ago, I was a six-week-old resident of New York City.

Manhattan beach egan