Review: Ask Again, Yes

Posted on 23 July, 2019

If you’re a fan of Sally Rooney’s writing but want more drama, this one’s for you.

There is no question in my mind about the quality of Sally Rooney’s writing. That Irishwoman is a farrier, fashioning fine filigree out of the everyday. But I have to admit I read Normal People and thought the people were just a bit too normal.

I read Conversations with Friends and felt her characters should have listened to Elvis: a little less conversation, a little more action, please.

Imagine, I mentally posited, if I could find an author who writes like Rooney but delivers on a really solid storyline. Enter Mary Beth Keane. She has all the delicacy of Rooney in the drawing of her thoroughly flawed characters and, my goodness, can she do drama! I was on the edge of my seat or at least as much as one can be when reading literary fiction in bed.

Ask Again, Yes begins in the early 70s at a New York police precinct. Brian Stanhope and Francis Gleeson are young, Irish and freshly graduated from the academy. They are assigned as each other’s partners and begin to work their beat.

They spend every day together, they apprehend criminals together, and they talk in a masculine way (while engaging in an activity but without discussing emotion) together. As they get to know one another, Brian tells Francis about a small, suburban town in upstate New York called Gillam. A Pleasantville-esque town where everyone has a garden and the kids deliver the newspapers on bicycles. Brian and his pregnant Galway girl, Anne, are thinking about moving there.

A year later, we find ourselves ensconced in the thoughts of Lena, longstanding girlfriend and soon-to-be wife of Francis Gleeson. Lena is frequently at home by herself, surrounded by empty houses in Gillam. Lena, an Italian-American, is used to being surrounded, even inundated, by family, and her loneliness seeps through her every thought.

Then, one day, a removalist’s truck pulls up in the driveway next door. She cranes eagerly out the window to see who her new neighbours will be. She tries to determine by sight alone whether they might be potential friends. The neighbours are Anne and Brian Stanhope. Of course, they are.

Lena thus begins an aggressive campaign to befriend Anne. Her weapon of choice? The casserole. Anne, however, makes it quite clear that she wants nothing to do with Lena, her casseroles, or, indeed, any of the Gleesons (a family that has over time expanded to include three daughters). While the Gleesons have increased their numbers, Anne has been struggling to bring a child to term.

Finally, at around the same time that Lena has her third daughter, Kate, Anne has a little boy called Peter.

Despite Anne’s best efforts, Peter and Kate become steadfast friends. Theirs is a friendship that cannot be interfered with. Until one night. A night on which a tragedy befalls them, a tragedy from which both families will suffer for the next four decades and over the course of the novel.

Keane deals gracefully and genuinely with the causes and effects of that fateful night, covering alcoholism, mental illness, familial ties, unexpected adulthood, marital mundanity, resentment, judgment, and the power of forgiveness. It was a powerful, vivid and affecting story that will stay with me for a long time.

I gave Ask Again, Yes four and a half out of five adults that don’t know what they’re doing any better than kids do.

Thank you to Penguin Books for providing me with a copy of Ask Again, Yes in exchange for my review.