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In fragments, Egan's novel makes repeated temporal leaps to tell the stories of a cast of characters, all connected through their love of rock and roll and their difficulty coming to terms with the passage of time. “How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about?” “Time's a goon”, he adds, aware that his body is proof of its brutality. Time has once again changed the music industry: the youngest consumer on record is “a three-month-old in Atlanta who'd purchased a song by Nine Inch Nails called ‘Ga-ga’” and “bands had no choice but to reinvent themselves for the preverbal”.

Jennifer Egan is known for her formal and thematic virtuosity, a constant reinvention that makes each of her novels feel fresh and surprising. “If I've read it or done it before then I'm not interested,” she claims, describing an “aesthetic … guided by curiosity and desire” (Julavitz). But this isn't the whole story; an exacting reader will find familiar threads running through Egan's fiction. Among the most consistent is an interest in siblings (or cousins, in The Keep ): how their relationships evolve over time, as they develop horizontal intimacies apart from the world of parents, and how they negotiate various forms of inequality—for instance, how a more typical sibling contends with a beloved other who is ill or disabled. These themes carry over into Egan's most recent novel, Manhattan Beach. Although many reviewers described it as an abrupt departure (Franklin; O'Rourke; Charles), the novel is consistent with Egan's previous work in featuring a disabled sibling and in being concerned with how genre—whether mystery, romance, PowerPoint presentation, or text message—shapes family dynamics. But where earlier projects are marked by unexpected generic combinations, Manhattan Beach hews closely to the contours of two interrelated forms: the historical novel and literary sentimentalism. At the heart of its thick portrait of a particular time and place is a sibling relationship that becomes an occasion for exploring the possibilities and limitations of genre.

In Jennifer Egan's manhattan beach, certain aspects of american culture—farmland in brooklyn, the ziegfeld follies, Jean Harlow's curls, the “old salts” who sailed in wooden ships (259)—are recalled at the moment of their vanishing. These and other disappearances provide evidence that, in the novel, historical change is treated as an epic trope. At the same time, disappearances mark swerves in an individual character's destiny as novelistic events. In its blending of history with individuals' stories, Manhattan Beach can be called an epic novel, along the lines of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Don DeLillo's Libra. Whereas novels particularize individual experience in an evolving present, epics position individual destinies in a fixed, complete history. Novels differ from epics in the distance that they take from their respective subjects, though the two genres demonstrate “all-inclusiveness” and “expansiveness” (Merchant 71, 93). The epic novel mobilizes at the point where national ambitions overlay personal stories. hrough the trope of disappearance, Manhattan Beach correlates the epic ambition to show historical transformation with the novelistic ambition to represent personal renewal. Disappearances may be escapes, but they also forecast characters' fresh starts and future convergences.

In a review for The New York Times , Amor Towles writes that Manhattan Beach “is far less interested in domestic relationships than in those of the workplace.” I would submit that Manhattan Beach is in fact suffused with domestic relations and that many of those relations are structured by disability plots. A few of those plot strands are so clichéd that you can hardly believe their prominence in this contemporary novel. But another cluster of the novel's disability motifs spins a fabric so inventive and rich that you begin to suspect Egan of deploying the other, shopworn plots chiefly to authenticate the novel's mid-century ethos, to evoke a moment when the American public tended to perceive disability as hopeless, or tragic, or repulsive. In what follows I extricate from the novel's broader historical concerns three of these related disability plots. I begin with an account of the disability-as-melodrama plot and then move to an analysis of the plotlines associated with novel's diffuse treatment of disability's generative powers. I close with a reading of the problematic plot that relies on what disability scholars call the “curative imaginary.” My aim here is to illustrate Egan's contrapuntal disability aesthetics.

The vortex of the twentieth century, the late 1930s and early to mid 1940s, provides an appropriate setting for Jennifer Egan's experiment in historical fiction. Many popular histories have glorified the bands of brothers and Rosie the Riveters of the so-called greatest generation. The best fiction and poetry of the 1940s offered a different, unflattering view. Journalists from that era—Martha Gellhorn, for one—said they needed fiction to get the history right (313). Literary treatments of the war focus on its incommunicability and on the crisis of meaning it inspired, but they have been vastly overshadowed by popular history books, documentaries, movies, and television shows that depend for their very production and distribution on an appeal to the fantasies that the contemporary war literature contradicts. In a decade when the idea of making America great again seems supercharged by notions of America when it was supposedly great, we can use some diving into the wreck.

Disabled women in literature seldom have erotic lives. Think of poor, crippled laura wingfield in Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie , waiting passively alongside her anxious mother to be taken up by a man. Or consider Gertie McDowell in James Joyce's Ulysses , the object of Leopold Bloom's voyeuristic fantasies, limping along, herself sexually blank. Even Eva Peace, the one-legged crone goddess in Toni Morrison's Sula , is done with sex. There is something at least untoward and at most perverse about representing disabled women as erotic. In The Sexual Politics of Disability , the sociologist Tom Shakespeare and his coauthors detail a long history of disability as a sexual disqualifier or as an occasion for perversity for both men and women in narrative representation.

As her epigraph to manhattan beach , Jennifer Egan chooses one of ishmael's typically abstract musings in moby-dick : “Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.” Yet more relevant is his observation in the opening paragraphs of Melville's novel: [T]here now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterwards…. Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon…. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. (795)

This article considers the relationship between national borders as divisive screens and screen-based technology in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. I argue that Hamid critiques digital technology and portrays digital technology users and refugees alike as present without presence. They live as connected to and yet disconnected from one another, their homes, and the nations to which they migrate. Ultimately, Hamid sees digital art and novels about digital culture as affording perspectives that toxic forms of digital technology do not. The perspectives these works afford create hope for a socially just future of meaningful interconnection.

Forty years ago, the poet and literary critic William Harmon distinguished between two ways in which language can fail. Writing in these pages, Harmon observed that speechlessness and silences can be markers of frustration, incapacity, and failed connections. Think of the disjointed language of William Faulkner's Benjy Compson in The Sound and the Fury or, more recently, the silences of the ghostly character Given who haunts Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing. Alternatively, spaces beyond the horizons of language can embody a tranquility so thorough and full of meaning that words would mar the perfection of the moment. In this second sense, inarticulateness is a point of peace and stillness toward which language is at best a clumsy passage. Harmon contended that in the twenty years between the world wars the poetry of T.S. Eliot shifted from the first sense of inarticulateness to the second (450).

This essay names and theorizes a stylistic development shared by a diverse range of contemporary American cultural phenomena: filter. Whether filtering photographs on social media platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat or filtering the chapters of novels of short stories by Colum McCann, Jennifer Egan, David Mitchell, and Elizabeth Strout, this is a style of improvising new genres of social recognition by purifying the affect of individuals within a given scene or space. In each case, filtering responds to a generalized sense of crisis when previously powerful institutions have declined in their ability to organize social life, including the institution of the family and the political institutions of Congress and the American political parties. By trying to repair this crisis, the stylistic developments I survey depart from simila aesthetic forms earlier in the twentieth century, whether photographic tinting and toning (e.g., sepia) in the case of social media filters; or rural short style cycles (e.g., Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, or Eudora Welty) in the case of contemporary novels of short stories. I develop a new theory of style up to the task of tracking this transition across media: style as an action of coordinating form and content.