43 pages • 1 hour read
Jennifer EganManhattan Beach
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Pocket Watch
Eddie treasures a silver pocket watch given to him by elderly Mr. De Veer, a wealthy wheelchair user with a military past. The watch comes to symbolize Eddie’s ambition for greatness and his resilience in the face of hardship. He initially worries that someone will think he stole the watch, so Mr. De Veer characterizes it as a loan rather than as a gift. When Mr. De Veer passes, however, Eddie doesn’t return the watch to his sister; he keeps it for himself.
Even though when Eddie sells most of his possessions after losing everything in the stock market crash, he never lets go of the watch. The fact that the watch is on loan, and not properly Eddie’s, resurfaces when he is separated from it during his faked drowning, in an effort to dupe Styles’s men. Years later, Anna finds the watch, with Mr. De Veer’s initials engraved into it, during her dive into New York Harbor—she assumes that Eddie has sunk along with it. She sleeps with the watch under her pillow, as though it is a talisman with properties that can be transferred to her. As she struggles to forgive Eddie later when they are reunited, she realizes that it was easier to deal with her father when was an idealized memory—contained in the watch—rather than the flawed man who abandoned her family.
When Eddie rises again, without the watch, he begins a new life as a lowly ship’s third mate. Although characterized as a war hero after his ship sinks, Eddie finds true heroism when he is lost at sea. He resolves his confusion over his daughter Lydia, comes home, and atones for his missteps. Only when parted from the watch does he achieve the heroism to which he had always aspired.
Dexter Styles’ Boathouse
The boathouse, a symbol of duplicity, is where Dexter Styles conducts his underhand dealings. Located near Manhattan Beach, it’s ostensibly a functional place where boats are stored and repaired, but in reality, it’s a place where people are deceived, manipulated, and dispatched. When Dexter leads Anna there to seduce her, he notes:
the old boathouse was an unlikely place for a tryst, having been the site of a number of Dexter’s business dealings over the years, not all of them pleasant. But the same advantages recommended it in both cases: it was isolated, private, padlocked. (268)
Before entering the boathouse with Anna, he thinks he is being deceptive by withholding information about the building’s true purpose. Anna, by using the name Feeney and hiding her lineage, is also deceiving him.
Chapter 25, which juxtaposes Ed Kerrigan’s alleged dispatchment in the boathouse with Dexter’s own, again shows the irony of Dexter being deceived while assuming that he is in control. On the way to the boathouse, Dexter has ominous premonitions that he has been set up by Mr. Q. and that he will never touch his wife again. When his former subordinate, Jimmy (aka Badger) shoots him in the back, Dexter takes his last moments of consciousness to think “by what radical reordering of the world” his murder has become feasible (407). The aspired-to allegiance between his father-in-law and Mr. Q. is real, and Dexter has fallen victim to their displeasure with him. Dexter loses control of the boathouse he once dominated, and it costs him his life.
The Sea
Both symbol and motif in Egan’s novel, the sea is imbued with mystery and persistence. For Anna, the sea holds hidden treasures and perhaps even lost objects, like the “charm bracelet that had fallen from her wrist into a storm drain” (7); for her father the sea is a “wasteland” filled with the bodies of the dead. Both characters live out these initial tropes later in the novel, as Anna searches for lost objects in the water–her father’s body—and Eddie avoids burial at sea twice before resurfacing for another chance at life.
Like Anna and Eddie, Lydia also has a connection to the sea. When Dexter and Anna take a sickly Lydia to the sea, she revives, imitating the sounds she hears around her: “Bird cree cree, see the waves hrasha, hrasha hrasha” (187). Lydia and the sea share a primal language; Lydia’s echolalia parallels the randomness of the waves. Later, starved and nearly dying, Eddie thinks he hears Lydia’s voice among the waves; he finally understands his daughter’s struggle of having a lively, intact mind inside a body that cannot fully function. Thus, the sea connects the two characters and becomes the place where Eddie learns to love and appreciate his youngest daughter.
Anna’s desire to reach the sea’s bottom anticipates her interest in diving and parallels her search to understand her father’s fate. When Eddie and Anna are reunited, their reconciliation takes place in front of the sea, where they watch the ships together. Though they cannot comprehend the ships’ calls any more than they can comprehend the people they have become, Anna and her father seek each other’s presence across the water’s foggy expanse. They are like ships looking for safe harbor and a place to call home.
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By Jennifer Egan
