Ask Again
Ask Again, Yes
Mary Beth Keane's new novel is chosen Ask Again, Yes.
What'southward it called again?
That's what everyone I've raved to virtually this book has said to me a couple of minutes subsequently I've told them the title. It's one of those fragile titles that instantly goes poof! into the air; but that's the only strike there is against Keane'due south novel which is, otherwise, one of the virtually unpretentiously profound books I've read in a long fourth dimension.
Enquire Again, Yep opens up in 1973 in New York Urban center. Books near the battered New York of the '70s and '80s take been having "a moment" ever since Patti Smith's memoir, Only Kids , was published in 2010 and, though Keane's novel, which takes place far abroad from Smith's punk hangouts, goes on to span forty years, its opening scene of a city gone haywire sets the emotional mood for the story that follows.
Two rookie cops, an Irish immigrant named Francis Gleeson and his partner, Brian Stanhope, are on foot patrol in the Bronx when they respond a call about an armed robbery in progress at a nearby bodega. When they get in they observe the owner lying dead in a puddle of blood. Francis, who's a sensitive immature guy, is overwhelmed for a minute past the career he'due south pretty much only fallen into. He reflects that:
"In that location was no predicting where life would get. There was no real way for a person to try something out, [simply] see if he liked it — the words he'd chosen when he told his uncle ... that he'd gotten into the police academy — considering you attempt it and attempt it and attempt information technology a picayune longer and next matter it'south who you are. One infinitesimal he'd been standing in a bog on the other side of the Atlantic and the next affair he knew he was a cop. In America. In the worst neighborhood of the best known metropolis in the earth.
Mary Beth Keane's previous books include The Walking People and Fever. Nna Subin/Scribner hide caption
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Nna Subin/Scribner
Mary Beth Keane's previous books include The Walking People and Fever.
Nna Subin/Scribner
Francis' meditation on how a series of happenstances solidify into a life is what Keane so beautifully dramatizes in Enquire Again, Yeah. Both young cops get married and within a few years current of air upwardly living adjacent door to each other in a suburb just due north of the urban center. 2 of their kids get shut, but the couples don't, mostly because Brian'south wife, a nurse named Anne, is "off," in a way nobody has the therapeutic language at that time to grasp. Then, virtually 20 years into the story, a horrible incident takes place. And the world that solidified by happenstance for Francis and all the other characters hither, blows apart in the same way.
Past switching perspective in every affiliate, then that the narrative moves forwards through the phonation and world view of almost every member of the ii families hither, Keane develops her characters far beyond glib stereotypes. At that place's Francis, his shrewd Italian-Polish wife, Lena, and Kate, the youngest of their three daughters, who'south been joined at the hip since childhood with Peter, the Stanhope's neglected son.
And then there'southward Anne, living with mental affliction: In a jittery and terrifying scene that weds the mundane to the mad, we enter into Anne'southward mind on New Yr's Eve 1990, when she makes a trip to the local supermarket deli counter, takes her number, waits, and, so, with mounting rage, comes to believe that everyone else in the supermarket is in cahoots to prevent her from ownership her common cold cuts.
Though Keane is younger than most of her characters, she writes with deep familiarity and precision about the lives of this particular generation of blue-collar Catholic New Yorkers. (And by the way, this was the geography, concrete and cultural, that I was born into, so I know whereof I speak.) In item, Keane "gets" the power of silence that was, dorsum then, the universal antidote for dealing with all manner of so-called "embarrassing" personal bug, from mental affliction to alcoholism.
As a writer, Keane reminds me a lot of Ann Patchett: Both have the magical power to seem to exist telling "only" a closely-observed domestic tale that transforms into something else deep and, yes, universal. In Keane's case, that "something else" is a story about forgiveness and acceptance — qualities that sound gooey, but are so hard to achieve in life.
And, in the final moments of this modestly magnificent novel, fifty-fifty that blah title of Enquire Again, Yep is ingeniously redeemed.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/25/735675181/ask-again-yes-is-a-profound-yet-unpretentious-family-drama
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