This round’s on Keane

Mary Beth Keane grew up round bars. “Most of my uncles owned bars or worked in them,” she says. Which is why, when the world entered COVID-19 lockdown, Keane discovered herself craving for the indoor camaraderie of a very packed bar. But in addition to socializing along with her husband and two sons, the very best she may do was drive round Pearl River, New York—the city the place she grew up and now lives—hoping to identify a good friend to talk with from afar. 

To compensate, Keane immersed herself in writing The Half Moon, named for the townie bar on the novel’s heart. The splendidly unpretentious, gifted author explains this by telephone from Bozeman, Montana, the place she’s researching her subsequent novel. (Its Western setting will herald a marked change from her beloved 2019 novel, Ask Again, Yes, and The Half Moon, each of that are set in Gillam, a fictionalized model of Pearl River.)

In the novel, Malcolm Gephardt has labored on the Half Moon for years, and now he lastly owns the place, with goals to replace and remodel it. Unfortunately, collectors are at his heels, his marriage is on the rocks, and within the midst of a blizzard, a patron goes lacking—setting the stage for loads of riveting inside and exterior drama.

“This is a COVID book,” Keane says, “even though it doesn’t seem that way.” The pandemic isn’t talked about, and there aren’t any masks in sight. But Keane poured her loneliness and isolation proper into Malcolm’s character, and the winter storm that paralyzes the city for per week or so accentuates the truth that plenty of her characters really feel trapped of their lives.

When requested concerning the impetus for The Half Moon, Keane explains that, at age 45, she’s beginning to see {couples} get divorced after which, 18 months or so later, share Facebook posts displaying “a whole new set of people and a new life,” she says. “I was thinking about to what degree we can change our lives once we reach a certain point. . . . I’m a very working-class child, and I grew up in a very Catholic community, and I don’t know whether it’s just me and the way I was raised, [but] I literally do not know how to do that.”

Not that she needs to, she provides shortly. “I’m very happy with my life. But part of being a writer is observing and watching other people, and I guess I just like thinking about things that I can’t imagine.” A good friend of Keane’s not too long ago commented that her books “are an argument for staying together, over and over,” which shocked the creator. “Although it’s so obvious when I think about it now,” she says.

In The Half Moon, nonetheless, the percentages of an intact marriage appear low. Malcolm’s spouse, Jess, a lawyer, has been dreaming of getting a toddler, however after years of unsuccessful fertility therapies, she has moved into the arms of another person. Keane writes that Jess is weighed down by “Hormones. Grief. Boredom. The growing sense that life was passing her by and if she didn’t do something she’d leave nothing behind to prove she was even there.” Jess and Malcolm have had bitter disagreements over the financing of the bar, which she acknowledges is his “baby,” his lifelong dream. 

“Every bartender in my family already thinks this book is about them.”

In crafting Jess and Malcolm’s rocky marriage, Keane had no concept what would occur between the couple, and he or she reported to her editors that she had “tried every [outcome] you could possibly suggest,” together with some wildly dramatic ones. Such is the “jigsaw” type of Keane’s artistic course of. “It seems like a piecemeal, haphazard way to write, but that’s the way I do it,” she says.

In a 2019 essay for the New York Times, she describes rising up with out books and the way her earliest literary affect as a child within the late Nineteen Eighties was the Reader’s Digest column “Drama in Real Life.” In a manner, Keane says, her upbringing was releasing, particularly when it got here to picking books on the library. “Boy, did I learn a lot from those Danielle Steel books,” she says, laughing. She wrote her first tales on the again of paper plates, then learn them aloud to her mother. Her first clue that she might need a expertise got here after writing a fourth-grade essay a few baked potato. Later, at age 13, she wrote a brief story for a faculty literary journal a few woman whose sister had dedicated suicide; it was so convincing that her mom started getting condolences from buddies who stated they didn’t notice that she had an older baby.

“I knew [early on] that it didn’t have to be true; it just had to be good,” Keane says. “So I always leaned toward fiction. I felt in my gut that I was better at writing than I was at other things.” As she grew older, her childhood studying habits allowed her to stay free from the burden skilled by many writers who attempt to measure as much as sure literary reputations. “I really don’t care what everyone thinks is good or not. I just read for myself. And I think that is a gift that not every writer has.” 

“As soon as I open a book and someone’s in therapy or playing tennis, I just don’t care.”

While Keane was at Barnard College, novelist Mary Gordon informed her, “You have a subject.” At the time, nonetheless, Keane had no clue what it was. “Suddenly,” she says, “I was with people who’d been all over the world, and they had read everything. They were writing about things like anorexia, bulimia, sex—things that just seemed beyond me. But what was interesting to me then, and I think still is, is work and what people do for a living.”

Keane is the daughter of two Irish immigrants; her mom had varied jobs, and her father was a “sandhog,” a New York City tunnel employee. For Ask Again, Yes, Keane interviewed members of the New York Police Department to gather correct particulars for her police officer characters, however with The Half Moon, she merely turned to household, gleaning insider bar information about issues like jukebox earnings, free swag from breweries, beverage distribution and state liquor licensing authorities. Her cousins tended to be extra useful than her uncles. “Irish people, they clam right up if they think you’re asking too many questions, especially since I’m a writer,” Keane says. With amusing, she provides, “Every bartender in my family already thinks this book is about them.”

The novel’s fictional bar takes its identify from the ship that English explorer Henry Hudson sailed on his 1609 voyage to find a Northwest Passage; quite a lot of locations and merchandise within the Hudson Valley share the Half Moon identify. The moniker is apt, since readers will ponder whether Malcolm and Jess’ marriage is waxing or waning. “I also like that the name isn’t overtly Irish,” Keane admits. “It sort of bothers me when everyone describes [my work] as ‘Irish people’ and ‘an Irish novel.’”

The hallmark of a traditional Keane character isn’t their background or heritage, however quite their incapacity to articulate what’s bothering them. “I’m more familiar with and more sympathetic to people who would sooner either tamp it way down and pretend it’s not there—or throw a beer bottle against a wall,” she says. Malcolm, for example, can allure clients along with his present of gab for hours, however at house, he’s not a lot of a talker. In reality, one in all his truest, most memorable types of self-expression comes when he throws a cup of espresso at somebody’s automobile. “These are my people, I guess,” Keane says. “As soon as I open a book and someone’s in therapy or playing tennis, I just don’t care.”

Keane has spent a lifetime observing individuals in fiction and actual life, and in each instances, she likes to maintain issues easy. “We’re just a disaster from beginning to end,” she says with amusing. “Nobody gets any smarter. It’s just that kids look up to us. But I want to say all the time, ‘I have absolutely no clue what I’m doing, but I’m going to drag you along with me, and we’re going to do our best. You know, try to be kind to the people you love. And that’s about it.’”

Photo of Mary Beth Keane by Martin Hickey