I remember Clare Sestanovich’s short story collection, Objects of Desire, being much praised when it was published which is what made me want to read her first novel, Ask Me Again. It begins with sixteen-year-old Eva meeting James in a Brooklyn hospital waiting room where her parents are anxiously sitting at her comatose grandmother’s bedside, and his brother has been admitted after a drunken binge.
We could talk about why we’re friends even though you live over there and I live over here and your dad is an unsuccessful artist and my dad is a successful art collector. Or we could talk about why we’re only friends, even though you’re a girl and I’m a boy and we’ve both at least considered the possibility of seeing each other naked.
Eva and James are from very different backgrounds: she’s the daughter of middle-class parents, his are divorced and super rich. Theirs is an unlikely friendship, their worlds so different they never intersect, and yet it lasts for many years, sometimes more tenuous than others. They see each other most weekends, James visiting Eva’s home, welcomed by her parents, but never the reverse. She wins a place at a prestigious university where she falls in love with Eli, another relationship that will continue in a variety of guises, never as important to him as the political career on which he is focussed. While Eva pursues her journalistic ambition, James drops out of college, joining the Occupy encampment on Wall Street moving in with Eva’s parents when it’s disbanded, then turning to a ramshackle church in his continuing search for meaning which will eventually lead to disaster. As Eva’s career turns sour, she becomes friends with her paper’s agony aunt, in time learning how to give advice herself.
Everything was happening to other people
Sestanovich’s novel is written from Eva’s perspective, beginning with her meeting with James and ending with a fleeting glimpse of him a decade or so later. Each of the chapter headings is a question, echoing Eva’s quest for meaning and purpose, perhaps with an eventual understanding that there are no answers. Little happens in this introspective novel. There’s a good deal of observation, something at which Eva excels, and speculation about characters’ lives and the way they live them. Friendships are made, loneliness endured, identities explored, and life lessons learned, all of it expressed in a low key yet absorbing style full of beautifully observed detail. A few chapters in, I wondered if it might be a borderline inclusion here for me, given this is a blog about recommendations, but the more I thought about it the more impressed with it I became. I’m loath to make the kind of comparisons favoured by publishers, often inaccurately, but if Sally Rooney’s novels send you screaming for the exit, best steer clear of this one. I’ll be happy to read whatever Sestanovich comes up with next.
Picador Books London 9781529053593 320 pages Paperback (read via NetGalley)
