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Equatorial NYC

"Ask Again, Yes" is a new novel getting a great deal of attention. It's literary fiction, but it's among the top five bestsellers in the NYT right now. A rare achievement.

The cover has some crowded suburban streets--house after house--but then the image is drenched in a bizarre blue-ish/green hue, so it feels like you're looking at something surreal.

The blurbs are from heavy hitters--J. Courtney Sullivan, Louise Erdrich, Meg Wolitzer. There is one truly moronic comment, and keeping it to only one seems like an achievement. The moronic comment is something like this: "Mary Beth Keane combines Joan Didion's attention to detail with Alice McDermott's emotional wallop." Why is this moronic? Because it implies that Alice McDermott herself does not have a notable attention to detail. When in fact McDermott is one of the most eagle-eyed writers alive today; her attention to detail equals, if not surpasses, Joan Didion's attention to detail. This sort of thing drives me nuts.

The book is about people struggling to say what is on their minds. A young cop in NYC wants to move to the suburbs, but he can't explain to his wife the real reason: He needs some kind of physical barrier between his home life and the horrors he encounters on the job everyday. In the suburbs, the couple encounters a strange set of neighbors. The neighbors endure a miscarriage without ever mentioning what has occurred; everyone nearby is left to infer that the expected baby isn't going to be coming. Later, pregnant again, the neighbors rudely shrug off offers of help. You know there's a mystery here. If you've ever struggled to understand why a colleague or friend is behaving the way he is behaving--in other words, if you are alive--then you will relate to the weird, tense cloudiness that Keane is describing.

That's as far as I've reached--in the story. Keep an eye on Keane. "Ask Again, Yes"--with its unusual, poetic title--will continue to be big news.

P.S. I love the "origin story" for this novel. Keane was trying to write a historical novel, but this contemporary story just kept bubbling up in her head. So she finally listened to herself. She abandoned her plans. That's life in the world of art!
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