Bronx-born Mary Beth Keane, whose 2019 novel Ask Again, Yes earned her much praise from Stephen King and Louise Erdrich, and an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, published another novel in May of 2023 called The Half Moon. In a fictional small town near New York named Gillam (one of the settings of Ask Again, Yes) live the Gephardts, Malcolm and Jess. Malcolm owns and runs a bar named The Half Moon, and Jess is a lawyer in the city. At the beginning of the novel’s main action, which lasts a week, Jess has gone to stay with a friend, and the failing bar sees visits from some mobster-ish creditors. Malcolm and Jess are both from Gillam, though he is older, and they did not meet until her college years. Married thirteen years, they’re a popular couple, he defined as the warm and convivial host, she less clearly as an impressive career woman. A friend warned her then that if she married this hunk and hometown hero, she’d be in some way confined to Gillam, known there mainly as Malcolm’s wife. Though their backgrounds are similar, their marriage is unusual in bringing into contrast the Cheers-like working class setting of The Half Moon with Jess’ little discussed but distinguished job in the city: Malcolm has his loyal buddies from the bar and from his school days, while Jess has college friend Cobie, who grew up without having to worry about money.
We are to understand that The Half Moon, which Malcolm bought from Hugh, his long time employer there, is both his dream and his child. He researches bars online and imagines making improvements to the menu, or renovating and opening the roof. Jess reckons he should pay off more of the debt and clean out his car before getting too ambitious, and she has her own dream, an actual child. They got married after an unexpected pregnancy which ended in miscarriage, and started trying for a baby six years later. Now, after seven years of trying to conceive with much expensive medical assistance, Jess has little hope, and Malcolm has long been resigned to infertility. There is a suggestion that the newfangled methods have assisted in opening the rift that became the separation: “When she was satisfied she placed her little bottles of saline and powder on top of the towels, her needle and plunger, too. ‘Can I help?’ he asked as she mixed the contents of one tiny bottle with another.” Meanwhile, Malcolm was once caught with his hands on another woman, and can’t look Jess in the eyes when Emma, his best bartender, is casually mentioned. He’s content enough in the marriage, whereas Jess is recently rather taken with friend of a friend Neil Bratton, a divorced lawyer who just moved to Gillam. Neil is looking not only for a second wife but also for a substitute mother to the three young children he’s brought with him.
This very eventful week starts with an almost fight at The Half Moon, unfortunately not very convincing in its presentation: “The young guy widened his stance, screwed his face into a grimace, and drew his elbow back. ‘Hang on,’ Malcolm said, but then the kid released, and next came the unmistakable sound of meat on meat.” The man who was punched, Tripp, sobers up but then disappears. There’s a blizzard which knocks out the power, giving some scenes the feeling, as Keane references in her acknowledgements, of the “strange and shapeless loneliness of early Covid.” Malcolm is told of Jess’ involvement with Neil by longtime friends Siobhan and Patrick. Both are outraged and Patrick intends to shun Jess completely. The balance is a little off and Malcolm is the fuller character, his careful maintenance of The Half Moon demonstrating that barkeeping is his vocation to go with his dutiful love for his mother and frustrated loyalty to Jess. She has not only left without promise of return but in getting together with Neil has done something which it is understood Malcolm would never do. The saga hurts Malcolm’s pride, but their friends support him. Jess ducks her head to avoid being seen in the car with Neil, and the whole affair is an embarrassment. Because their problems are serious, Jess and Malcolm’s marital unhappiness is at least dignified, unlike Jess’ infidelity. Keane shows in Jess’ and Neil’s furtive movements toward adultery that they are having something like a second adolescence: “He found her on Facebook a week or so after Labor Day, went on a tear of liking her photos one night. She screenshotted the notifications, wrote ‘psycho,’ and almost sent it to him.” She puts the phone down and looks at sleeping Malcolm, imagining in meticulous detail the routine he will follow the next day, the egg sandwich without cheese, the scratch-off lottery ticket, and the twenty minutes reading the newspaper.
Keane manages flashbacks and character background with skill, keeping the story rolling along while giving the marriage at its center a thick history, with the warm and worn feeling of over a decade’s companionship. Jess’ ignorance about Neil beyond his seeming like a devoted single father obviously forms a contrast. There are others: “Even in the dead of winter his skin had a gold tone and didn’t turn ruddy and pink like hers did, like Malcolm’s did, too.” Is he even really Irish? When she gets to his place, we’re reminded how little she knows by this detail: “She looked away from the books piled on the fireplace mantel in case she caught a glimpse of Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman.” If the Facebook flirtation evoked high school, Jess has graduated, and is now trying to take the collegiate millennial’s attitude: do what you want but avoid problematic associations. Without history, and with everything complicated by prior relationships, the bond between Jess and Neil can be built only on attraction and convenience. If he has bad politics, that will be unflattering for Jess, maybe unbearably so. An awareness of how her decisions might be judged, and not only in moral terms, troubles her. Neil’s babysitter won’t look Jess in the eyes, and Jess wonders if she’ll gossip with friends about the new couple: “One would ask the babysitter-friend to please snap a good pic of Neil next time she was there. He didn’t have much of a social media presence, and they’d like to discuss how he stacked up against Malcolm.”
The plot gets pulpier towards the end: besides the menacing associates of Hugh, who has some bad history with Malcolm’s dad, there are some other unscrupulous sorts previously thought dependable, and two insurance fraud storylines come into a strange confluence. Character consistency is compromised a little, and so is honesty, which Keane seems to relegate to lesser importance than loyalty, though one can imagine Malcolm and Jess, troubled by the deceptions of the last few chapters which helped see them to safety, volunteering belated confessions. The resolution of the debt problems appropriately involves both marital teamwork and the resources of the past, Malcom’s mother’s faint memory providing critical information. It’s the many pasts, shared by families—even the family formed by a husband and wife—and circles of small town friends, that prevail over interlopers and troublemakers, and show themselves to be some of the highest goods. Keane’s characters do have the occasional gift of enjoying something while it’s happening, which might be yet more precious:
Most businesses had heeded the weather forecast and closed in advance of the coming storm, but when Malcolm approached the traffic light and saw his own squat, brown-shingled building at the bottom of the hill, something lifted in his chest and he leaned over the steering wheel.