Stories about ships and sailors are propelled by adventure, survival, and danger. But their essences — their hulls and keels — are power and order. Nearly any seafaring tale, from Moby-Dick to The Caine Mutiny to Jaws, is about the importance of sticking to the rules once you’re out to sea, and how easily that stability crumbles, Ahab-like, in a crisis. The men — always men — are forever working to keep chaos at bay aboard a ship that’s always referred to as a she.

Power, and especially the gendered nature of it, is central to Jennifer Egan’s fifth novel, Manhattan Beach. It’s first and foremost a deeply researched historical novel about mobsters, sailors, and shipbuilders during World War II, which arguably makes it Egan’s most conventional work — especially coming on the heels of 2010’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which foregrounded its stylistic somersaults, from celebrity profile patter to PowerPoint charts. But the new novel’s meticulousness about battleships in Brooklyn and nightclubs in Manhattan shouldn’t obscure the fact that Egan is still playing with form. She’s just doing it in the hulls and keels — she’s just using the structure of the historical novel to shake up the good-girl-done-good story.

The girl in this case is Anna, the daughter of Eddie, a bagman for Irish mobsters who strains to keep his family together in the Depression years before Pearl Harbor. Anna’s mom is a former vaudeville performer who now takes in sewing; Anna’s sister, Lydia, is severely disabled and nearly mute. Eddie’s failure to maintain order challenges his sense of manliness, a struggle that ultimately leads to his sudden disappearance. Hence, Anna becomes the head of a household: “She might as well have been a boy,” Egan writes. “Dust in her stockings, her ordinary dresses not much different from short pants. She was a scrap, a weed that would thrive anywhere, survive anything.”

So far, so Scout-ish. But for Egan, Anna represents more than mere tomboyishness, because a tomboy’s brashness and precocity have no place in the world Anna wants to occupy. That would, for starters, get her booted from the snoozy piecework job she takes after Pearl Harbor at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where she and hundreds of other women assist with ship construction. “We Can Do It!” shouts that famous bicep-flexing Rosie the Riveter poster, but deference to routine was the order of the day for women on the docks. “Anna tried to impersonate a girl who knew nothing,” Egan writes of Anna’s survival strategy. But she knows plenty. She whispers her adolescent sexual experiences into Lydia’s ear because her sister will never comprehensibly repeat them; she angles for a job as a diver at the Navy Yard only after repeatedly assuring one Lieutenant Axel that she’ll likely fail.

Because one thing Anna knows is that Axel will say something just this officious and lunkheaded: “Water is heavy. The pressure of that weight is something ferocious. We’ve no idea how the female body would react.” Just as she’s navigating toward permission to put on a diving suit, she’s also courting Dexter, a club owner who was a regular stop on Eddie’s old bagman rounds. Dexter might have a clue to her father’s whereabouts aboveground; the bottom of New York Harbor might have a clue below. But in neither case is she free to ask the question directly to the men who are equipped to answer it.

To that end, Anna’s heroism is a kind of restrained pushiness. “Following rules had got her nowhere,” Anna thinks during a moment underwater, making a repair that’s technically a man’s job. “Passing tests had got her nowhere. In the course of getting nowhere, she had given up on some larger vision in which being good and trying to please made any sense. Why not take what she could while she had the chance?” Anna evokes the distinction between what management gurus like to call hard and soft power — clear centers of authority versus the kind of authority marginalized people have to claim for themselves, strategically and not without difficulty. Historical novelists often apply the sensibility of our times to the past, deliberately or not, but the educated forcefulness of contemporary feminism would clang badly here. If what Anna is doing is feminist, it’s feminism of a temporary, provisional sort. “Her life was a war life; the war was her life,” Egan writes.

Anna has her share of stubbornness, but what she mainly has is a mix of dumb luck combined with a grasp of how men wield and lose power. An aunt taught her that, arguing that “men were the biggest failures: rats, lice, good-for-nothings — you couldn’t blame them; they’d been bumly manufactured. The best possible outcome of marriage was a wealthy, childless widowhood.” And Dad taught her that too, his wisdom filed down to a sharp point by mobsters and poverty.

But Moby-Dick doesn’t endure because it’s a book about Queequeg squabbling with Starbuck over Ahab. Manhattan Beach has plenty of adventure-survival-danger, too, especially in an extended set piece featuring the wreck of a merchant marine boat and the survivors’ agonizing wait for rescue. What intensifies that drama, though, is Egan’s sense of how the different paths that are cleared for men and blocked for women lead to such predicaments.

And even if Anna’s authority is provisional, it’s a pleasure to experience those moments where she’s savvy enough to claim it. Her first time underwater, she calibrates her diving suit so that she neither sinks to the bottom nor shoots to the surface: “The weight that had been so punishing on land now allowed her to stand and walk under thirty feet of water, at this tide, that otherwise would have spat her out like a seed.” For a moment, she’s beautifully obscured, unscrutinized, weightless, free.

 

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Patti Smith opens Devotion with a riff on inspiration, which she invokes as “the unforeseen quantity, the muse that assails at the hidden hour.” Yes, the unforeseen quantity . . . although we might refer to it as the unforeseen quality as well. Who understands how inspiration operates, the way a set of glimmers or observations coalesce inside the mind and are transmuted into image, thought, or narrative? Even those who do creative work are hard-pressed to offer more than homilies. I think of William Faulkner, who once explained that “the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.” Or Albert Einstein, who suggested that “imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world.” What they — and Smith — are saying is that it’s impossible to pinpoint how, exactly, an idea or piece of work comes into being, that if not mystical exactly it is at a level beyond conscious reckoning. “Most often,” Smith elaborates, “the alchemy that produces a poem or a work of fiction is hidden within the work itself, if not imbedded in the coiling ridges of the mind.” In that regard, perhaps, the most definitive statement she or any artist can make is something like this one: “I had inadvertently produced evidence, annotating as I went along.”

For Smith, that is a matter, as much as anything, of process, the way our work often surprises us as it finds its form. And yet, lest this seem too mechanical, Smith remains attentive to what she might refer to as the holiness of the task. There’s a reason her new book — which grew out of the Windham-Campbell Lectures she delivered at Yale last year and kicks off Yale University Press’s series “Why I Write” — is called Devotion; she is, as she has long been, devotional in her approach. Think of that famous opening to her debut album, Horses: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” The line projects a tone of punk rock swagger, a sneer in the face of expected pieties — until the verse resolves in an unexpected couplet: “My sins my own / They belong to me.” Attitude becomes acceptance, or better, a posture of responsibility. “[T]here are precious words to grind,” she writes in Woolgathering, which is my favorite of her books, an impressionistic anti-memoir in which childhood memories blur into imagination, or spiritual practice, or something that is equal parts of both. I don’t want to make too much of this; like all artists, Smith recognizes that what she does is hard work, days and months of staring down both blankness and self-doubt. Nonetheless, as she observes in her poem “The Writer’s Song”: “it is better to write / then die / a thousand prayers / and souvenirs / set away in earthenware / we draw the jars / from the shelves / drink our parting / from ourselves / so be we king / or be we bum / the reed still whistles / the heart still hums.”

Devotion emerges directly from such territory: The book is a meditation on creativity and its (dis)contents. Divided into three parts, it asks us to consider the relationship between inspiration, work, and aftermath — not by explaining but by illustrating the ways they interact. How does Smith achieve this? She begins with a section entitled “How the Mind Works,” which could be a missing chapter from her preceding book, M Train. What makes M Train so vivid is its quality of serendipity, of unfolding in the present; reading it feels like accompanying Smith on a journey, both exterior and interior, physical and emotional, in which neither she nor we are sure where we’ll end up. The first part of Devotion has a similar quality, beginning with a description of a film about the 1941 forced deportation of Estonians by the Soviets, then offering a few lines, a few brief sequences, in response. Afterward, we follow Smith to her neighborhood café, where she reads Patrick Modiano while pondering her inchoate desire to put something on the page. The references to other artists, other work, have long been part of Smith’s method; she likes to wear her influences on her sleeve. Here, that means less her usual heroes (William Burroughs, Rimbaud, Robert Mapplethorpe) than a related set of ghosts, mostly French — Camus and Simone Weil, primarily — which is only fitting since much of “How the Mind Works” takes place in France.

Smith’s point — that we can never shed the artists who have come before us, nor should we want to, for they make us who we are — sits at the very center of her project, which has always (among other things) positioned her in a lineage. Thus, she invokes Schiller and Joyce and Goethe, as well as other “ghosts of writers” who have walked the path she now treads. “I knew Genet,” the head of the French publisher Gallimard tells her, “softly, looking away so as not to appear immodest.” For Smith, this is all part of the atmosphere — of Paris, yes, but also of her inner life. The writing, when it comes, grows out of both impulses, or maybe it begins at the moment they coalesce. Either way, it is at the seaside town of Sète that she begins what will become the second part of the book, a long fable named Devotion, which traces the relationship of a teenage ice skater, the daughter of an Estonian couple lost in the deportations, and an older man who becomes her fateful love. “Her mind was a muscle of discontent,” Smith writes, describing her protagonist, a line so stunning it stops me short. This is how the particular bleeds into the universal, how the experience of this young woman speaks to a condition that is shared, I believe, by nearly all of us. “Languages are like chess,” she tells the man, to which he replies, “And words are like moves?” The porousness, the extent to which we are aware of, although undistracted by, the presence of the author in the background, is a key intention of the book.

On the one hand, this has everything to do with Smith herself; she always sits at the center of her work. For her, writing (or music or photography) is an interior exploration, although it also is, it must be, something more. At times, this has led her to indulgence: Radio Ethiopia, for instance, an album I adored when I was younger, if much less so now. Still, this is what is so astonishing about her career and what motivates Devotion — the way that, as she has gotten older, Smith’s vision has expanded, framing her self-awareness not as self-absorption but rather a deep dive into everything, the exhilaration and the terror and the transcendence that we all share. “What is the task?” she wonders in the closing lines here. “To compose a work that communicates on several levels, as in a parable, devoid of the stain of cleverness . . . What is the dream? To write something fine, that would be better than I am, and that would justify my trials and indiscretions. To offer proof, through a scramble of words, that God exists.”

I’m not entirely sure about the God part, although really that’s a matter of semantics, since what Smith is asking for has less to do with any deity than with the intention to write beyond oneself. That is the point of Devotion, and its message also: art making as inspirational act. Such inspiration is less a search for a starting point than a mechanism for connection, a desire to communicate. “Why do we write?” Smith asks, and the answer comes encoded in the question, as of course it must. “A chorus erupts . . . Because we cannot simply live.”

 

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Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.

Whether Roxane Gay is writing fiction or essays and memoir, it often seems as if there’s no territory she can’t make her own, turning her sharp insight and wry humor from feminism and gender politics and sex to literary criticism and television and movies and other points of pop culture. The title of her acclaimed, bestselling essay collection, Bad Feminist, started as a joke for her — but soon became something of a badge of honor, and a touchstone for a generation of readers. In her work she uses candor to pull into the light of day a familiar but often repressed jumble of desires, insecurities, anxieties, fears, and feelings–the messy stuff of life that many might prefer to shove in a box under the bed. She joined Miwa Messer on the podcast to talk about what drove her to write her first book-length memoir, Hunger.

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“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.”

New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she casts an insightful and critical eye on her childhood, teens, and twenties—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers into the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life.

With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and authority that have made her one of the most admired voices of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen. Hunger is a deeply personal memoir from one of our finest writers, and tells a story that hasn’t yet been told but needs to be.

Click here to see all books by Roxane Gay.

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