The Wheelchair: A Three-Part Drama

In a review for The New York Times , Amor Towles writes that Manhattan Beach “is far less interested in domestic relationships than in those of the workplace.” I would submit that Manhattan Beach is in fact suffused with domestic relations and that many of those relations are structured by disability plots. A few of those plot strands are so clichéd that you can hardly believe their prominence in this contemporary novel. But another cluster of the novel's disability motifs spins a fabric so inventive and rich that you begin to suspect Egan of deploying the other, shopworn plots chiefly to authenticate the novel's mid-century ethos, to evoke a moment when the American public tended to perceive disability as hopeless, or tragic, or repulsive. In what follows I extricate from the novel's broader historical concerns three of these related disability plots. I begin with an account of the disability-as-melodrama plot and then move to an analysis of the plotlines associated with novel's diffuse treatment of disability's generative powers. I close with a reading of the problematic plot that relies on what disability scholars call the “curative imaginary.” My aim here is to illustrate Egan's contrapuntal disability aesthetics.