Irony and tricks had nothing to offer a shipwreck story, she found

Novelist Jennifer Egan was describing how she decides the form for each new novel. After finishing one book, she said, she tries to push in the opposite direction with the next one.

“Once I’ve done something, I want to work against it,” she said. The choice happens book by book.

Her example was the move from A Visit from the Goon Squad to Manhattan Beach. The first is a linked novel about music and time that jumps among characters and years, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. The second is a historical novel set in wartime New York around the Navy Yard and the waterfront.

Goon Squad moves among viewpoints and decades, keeps important events out of view, and weaves in present-day technology. Egan said she had been rewarded for that kind of inventive construction, and she walked into Manhattan Beach expecting to stay inventive and avoid writing a straightforward historical novel.

She described that pull as a trap, she said, the sense that because she had been praised for being experimental, she was supposed to be experimental again. She said she would “use some tricky narrative strategies” and “do something that isn't just straight up historical fiction.”

She tried them, she said, and quickly stopped. The story, the work and the narrative “utterly rejected those attempts.”

What she learned, she said, was that writing about a shipwreck, a gangland murder, and survival at sea left no use for broken-up form. “Irony and fragmentation had nothing to offer me,” Egan said.

What was left was simpler. “Just do it,” she said. “Just tell the story.”