THE HALF MOON, by Mary Beth Keane
The experience of reading Mary Beth Keane’s absorbing new novel, “The Half Moon,” feels — pleasantly — like breathing, or maybe just living. When we meet Malcolm and Jess Gephardt, their marriage is in a sludgy stage of dissolution, a casualty of hasty decisions, imprudent judgments and exhaustion. Malcolm mans his slowly failing bar, the Half Moon, in their hometown, Gillam, unable and unwilling to give up on his dream, and Jess has left him to go live temporarily with a friend in nearby New York City.
The Gephardts are a certain type of couple, “the prom king and queen,” Jess’s friend tells her. Malcolm is very good-looking, “beautiful, still” — “the kind of man who’d get better with each passing year” — and Jess is attractive and endlessly intelligent ; she went to law school and works in the city. They met when she was home for a visit and Malcolm, who was already working at the bar and earning money, made the students surrounding Jess “look like little boys.” A law school friend cautions Jess that “with Malcolm, Jess’s boundaries would always be Gillam’s” — but, infatuated, she plunges ahead. During the first heady months of their relationship, Jess finds herself pregnant. Young and in love, they decide to marry, only to suffer a miscarriage.
Thus they begin their marriage. Seven years later, Malcolm and Jess decide to try for a baby and find it’s not as easy as they had thought. We see them again six and a half years later, when they have been buffeted by the many indignities of middle age: the thousand cuts of relentless bills, student loans, not making partner, fertility treatments. Malcolm has bought the bar from the elusive Hugh, who has an odd chip on his shoulder about Malcolm’s father having owned a more successful bar in Manhattan years ago. Malcolm has also bought the building without consulting Jess, and this decision is a fault line in their relationship. To make matters worse, he completes the transaction without consulting a lawyer (“out of respect” for Hugh).
Malcolm is a man who believes things work out: “He was rescued because he was always going to be rescued.” This easygoing nature is a bitter pill for Jess, a worrier who feels her childlessness keenly. At a neighborhood barbecue, other women speak in an unfamiliar vocabulary: “Do you need a Boppy? A binky? Do you have a Tommee Tippee? A Boon Orb?”
This is where she meets Neil Bratton, a divorced father who has moved to town with three very young children. Whether it’s the appeal of a ready-made family or the result of her growing distance from Malcolm, Jess feels a pull toward Neil. They exchange tentative, searching texts that skirt the line between appropriate and illicit. Both Malcolm and Jess have had near-transgressions over the course of their marriage, but this feels more serious.
Keane excels at moments of interior deliberation — for instance, when Jess hesitates before sending Neil an irreverent text (she barely knows him, after all): “Something told her to pause, to think for a second. She slowly deleted the letters of his name. She deleted the screenshot.”
Later, when Jess leaves Malcolm and starts spending nights at Neil’s, she immediately imagines their future together: “Where do you put your recycling? she’d ask upon moving in, and then, after being told just once, that’s where she’d put her recycling for the rest of her days.”
These are not earth-shattering or groundbreaking observations, but they are precisely why it’s such a pleasure to sink into Keane’s quietly luminous prose: Her recordings of the small, significant moments of life have a way of standing for something larger. Reading them is like slipping into a comfy chair with a blanket and a steaming hot cup of tea and discussing last night’s party with your best friend.
A slightly bizarre series of intrigues colors the end of “The Half Moon,” where the Gephardts consider committing insurance fraud, are unwillingly involved in a customer’s S.E.C. investigation and figure out how to save the bar and possibly their relationship. But suffice it to say that the logistics of the plot are secondary: Malcolm and Jess provide the real momentum behind this novel. While marriage may be an endless, evolving equation of events and decisions that increase or decrease the original store of love, in the end, one hopes, there is still, indeed, love. Keane understands this. Her perceptive, generous observations and attention to her characters’ inner lives make for a book that is much, much more than the sum of its characters. She manages to find the extraordinary grace in our achingly ordinary world.
Janice Y.K. Lee is the author of “The Piano Teacher” and “The Expatriates.”
THE HALF MOON | By Mary Beth Keane | 304 pp. | Scribner |$28
