Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.Everything in Manhattan Beach appears to have been researched to the point of tedium, from the magazines being read in doctors’ surgeries in 1944 (“Magazines had been fanned precisely over a lacquered coffee table: Collier’s, McClure’s, The Saturday Evening Post”) to the brand of convertible driven by the day’s mobsters: “He never let another man behind the wheel of his new Series 62 Cadillac,” we’re told of Dexter Styles, a Vito Corleone type who dreams of joining his WASP father-in-law in the more “legitimate” world of speculative banking. No doubt these terms are historically accurate. “Gangsters”, “loogans”, “associates” or “hoods” are the preferred nomenclature. Unlike Goon Squad, a series of inventive, interlinked stories about rock-stars getting old, this one features actual goons, though the word is used just once, on page 324. The long awaited follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad, Manhattan Beach is a period work whose plot wends its way from a portentous meeting on the Brooklyn shore during the Great Depression to the naval yards of San Francisco moments before Germany’s capitulation. There’s a lot to learn from Jennifer Egan’s new novel, both about deep-sea diving during the Second World War and the dangers of historical fiction.
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