"Manhattan Beach"

[fiefoe]

I liked this story better than Jennifer Egan's last one, "The Good Squad". Anna's crippled sister and her gangster lover work well as plot devices; there's the extra effort to include a U-boat attack and its aftermath, and Anna and Eddie's essential blandness goes down easy.

• At the mention of his boxers, Denelu's face loosened like a cold roast warming over a flame.
• Hope became the memory of hope. A numb, dead patch.
• released from a scaffolding of pretense she'd be unaware of having to maintain with the other girls
• “We’ll emerge from this war victorious and unscathed, and become bankers to the world. We’ll export our dreams, our language, our culture, our way of life. And it will prove irresistible.”
• slinky refinement / a somersault of artificial laughter
• He likes the thought that his power would one day be refined into translucency, with no memory of the blood and earth that had generated it.
• a dark umbrella of worry opening inside him
• His mournful rejection of the sleight of hand whereby the shadow world blended with everyone else could see infuriated Dexter. Maintaining appearance is much more than what was underneath. The deeper things could come and go, but what broke the surface would be lodged in everyone's memory.
• bruised politeness / a dig of disappointment
• “You know the expression,” Eddie said. “ ‘Don’t write if you can talk, and don’t talk if you can nod.’ ” Styles was delighted. “A mick said that.”
• the sea was a gray iridescence.
• Mr. Q's chores is a source of gentle mirth among his chiefs on those rare occasions they met, but cautious mirth, none wanting to laugh harder than anyone else.
• An allegiance between she and Mavel will jeopardize whatever slender ties fastened each of them to the larger group, so the estrangement that they had in common estranged them doubly.
• Having been nourished by so much proximity, Ana couldn't bear her solitude.
• Without the familiar ballast of her loneliness, she felt unmoored.
• She towed him by the hand along the halls of his memory to the room where his old life had been carefully stowed away.
• One thing was certain: Rose had been wrong about the world becoming small again. Or at least it would not be the same small world it had been. Too much had changed. And amid those shifts and realignments, Anna had slipped through a crack and escaped.