The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello, and welcome to the Slate Audio Book Club for the month of November 2017.

I'm Katie Waldman, a staff writer at Slate, and I'm joined today by Slate Book Critic, Laura Miller.

Hi, Laura. Hi, Katie.

And by the critic and writer and audio book club founder, Megan O'Rourke. Hi, Megan.

Hi. Before we get started, I wanted to let you all know that next month, we're discussing Emily

Wilson's new translation of The Odyssey. Wilson is the first woman ever to translate a homeric epic, or at least to produce a

commercial translation with wide distribution that I know of, that we know of. So we're very excited

to dive into that. Wilson also appeared on the Culture Gap Fest, so be sure to check out that

great discussion. Today we are conversing about Manhattan Beach, the fourth novel from Jennifer Egan,

who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 for her really dazzling book, a visit from the Goon Squad.

Manhattan Beach is, as all the reviews have been tirelessly repeating, an extremely different

kind of book. It's an historical novel about World War II divers and

gangsters and sailors and longshore men. It is formally intricate, but not formally innovative,

or even necessarily innovative in any sense, as you argue in your review, Laura. It centers on three

main characters, a plucky young woman, Anna, her father Eddie, and the mysterious criminal, Dexter Stiles, with whom they both become entangled, instead of 15 or so characters, which was the case for her goon squad.

It is, of course, beautifully written and exhaustively researched, so in that sense, it feels like the Egan we know.

But I wanted to ask both of you

whether your expectations about this author, Jennifer Egan, shaped your experience of this book

and how you feel it fits into her career. Were you surprised or disappointed or you thought

there's a pretty continuous line from what she's done in the past to hear? So I'd be curious to hear what either of you guys think about that.

Well, I definitely, when I, the more I heard about it before I read it, the less enthusiastic I became about it

...