Mary Beth Keane Ask Again Yes

Ask Again, Yes

by Mary Beth Keane

Mary Beth Keane's new novel is called Ask Again, Yeah.

What's it chosen again?

That's what everyone I've raved to about this book has said to me a couple of minutes later I've told them the title. Information technology's 1 of those fragile titles that instantly goes poof! into the air; only that'due south the merely strike at that place is confronting Keane's novel which is, otherwise, 1 of the near unpretentiously profound books I've read in a long time.

Ask Again, Yes opens up in 1973 in New York Urban center. Books about the dilapidated New York of the '70s and '80s have been having "a moment" ever since Patti Smith'south memoir, Only Kids , was published in 2010 and, though Keane'south novel, which takes identify far away from Smith's punk hangouts, goes on to span 40 years, its opening scene of a city gone haywire sets the emotional mood for the story that follows.

Two rookie cops, an Irish gaelic immigrant named Francis Gleeson and his partner, Brian Stanhope, are on foot patrol in the Bronx when they respond a call well-nigh an armed robbery in progress at a nearby bodega. When they arrive they find the owner lying expressionless in a pool of blood. Francis, who'south a sensitive young guy, is overwhelmed for a minute by the career he's pretty much just fallen into. He reflects that:

"In that location was no predicting where life would go. There was no real style for a person to try something out, [but] come across if he liked it — the words he'd chosen when he told his uncle ... that he'd gotten into the police academy — considering y'all try it and effort it and try it a little longer and next thing it's who y'all are. I 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 city in the world.

Mary Beth Keane'due south previous books include The Walking People and Fever. Nna Subin/Scribner hide explanation

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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 then beautifully dramatizes in Ask Over again, Aye. Both young cops get married and inside a few years wind upward living next door to each other in a suburb merely north of the city. Two of their kids become close, but the couples don't, mostly because Brian'due south wife, a nurse named Anne, is "off," in a way nobody has the therapeutic language at that time to grasp. Then, near 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 chapter, so that the narrative moves forward through the vox and earth view of almost every member of the two families hither, Keane develops her characters far across glib stereotypes. There's Francis, his shrewd Italian-Polish married woman, Lena, and Kate, the youngest of their iii daughters, who's been joined at the hip since childhood with Peter, the Stanhope'southward neglected son.

So there's Anne, living with mental illness: In a jittery and terrifying scene that weds the mundane to the mad, we enter into Anne's mind on New Year's Eve 1990, when she makes a trip to the local supermarket deli counter, takes her number, waits, and, then, with mounting rage, comes to believe that everyone else in the supermarket is in cahoots to prevent her from buying her 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 blueish-collar Catholic New Yorkers. (And by the way, this was the geography, concrete and cultural, that I was born into, and so I know whereof I speak.) In item, Keane "gets" the ability of silence that was, dorsum then, the universal antidote for dealing with all manner of and then-called "embarrassing" personal problems, from mental affliction to alcoholism.

Equally a writer, Keane reminds me a lot of Ann Patchett: Both have the magical power to seem to exist telling "but" a closely-observed domestic tale that transforms into something else deep and, yes, universal. In Keane'south instance, that "something else" is a story about forgiveness and credence — qualities that sound gooey, only are so difficult to achieve in life.

And, in the final moments of this modestly magnificent novel, even that blah title of Ask Again, Yes is ingeniously redeemed.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2019/06/25/735675181/ask-again-yes-is-a-profound-yet-unpretentious-family-drama