The result is both an engrossing yarn and a stunning literary achievement.

Egan toggles between these disparate tones and styles with a singular authorial voice. Though it borrows heavily from On the Waterfront-style gangland stories, and much of it takes place at night, it also liberally weaves in elements from workplace procedurals, seafaring adventure tales (particularly Treasure Island and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) and soapy melodramas. Manhattan Beach has been described as a noir thriller, and that’s halfway true. The why of Eddie’s disappearance nags at Anna and remains the novel’s central mystery. Her father, who vanished (perhaps intentionally) five years earlier, left Anna alone with her mother Agnes, a Ziegfeld Follies alum, and younger sister Lydia, an invalid who suffers from a degenerative disorder. Anna, now a young adult, works as a civilian in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, first as an inspector, measuring parts for ships headed to battle, and later as a diver, repairing their underwater surfaces.

The bulk of Manhattan Beach unfolds after an early flash-forward to World War II. But their zigzagging connections lay the foundation for Egan’s tale of tragedy, redemption and (in Anna’s case) something close to triumph. Once established, their trajectories are flung outward following this meeting, only to intersect in two-person permutations throughout Manhattan Beach. As a trio, their paths cross for the first and last time during the novel’s inaugural chapter.

Here Egan introduces her three protagonists: the quietly independent and whip-smart Anna Kerrigan, aged 11 Anna’s father Eddie, a midlevel union racketeer and Dexter Styles, a sympathetic gangster who longs for legitimacy. Manhattan Beach opens in its titular Brooklyn neighborhood during the Great Depression. The ocean, as the clichéd critical trope goes, is a non-human character in Egan’s rich and fully realized cast, omnipresent and looming. Manhattan Beach is, at its heart, a maritime tale. For the epigraph to her magnificent new novel, Manhattan Beach, Jennifer Egan chooses a line from Moby-Dick that describes the elemental relationship, the marriage, between mankind and the roiling, wine-dark sea: “Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.” It’s a spiritual observation, one she explores by way of latticed crosscurrents and literal depths, maybe not with Melville’s solemnity, but with an equal penchant for the sublime.

Manhattan beach novel review