This novel has overlapping stories that, like tugboats, nudge one another into harbor. It’s an old-fashioned page-turner, tweaked by this witty and sophisticated writer so that you sometimes feel she has retrofitted sleek new engines inside a craft owned for too long by James Jones and Herman Wouk. It’s a dreadnought of a World War II-era historical novel, bristling with armaments yet intimate in tone. Jennifer Egan’s immensely satisfying fifth novel, “Manhattan Beach,” the follow-up to “A Visit From the Goon Squad” (2010), which won a Pulitzer Prize, has a good deal of that kind of life-swamping and life-supplementing effect. You live several lives while reading it.” One definition of a great novel, William Styron said, is that it should “leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end.
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