"How'd we get here, Jess?" Malcolm Gephardt asks his wife at one point in The Half Moon. The story of how Malcom and Jess arrived "here"--separated and unhappy in their mutual hometown of Gillam, N.Y.--and how they're proceeding to cope is told nimbly and well in Mary Beth Keane's marriage-in-crisis novel.
Malcolm is worried about his struggling bar, the Half Moon. He's also worried about his marriage, such as it is: he and Jess have been living apart for four months, having succumbed to the strains of financial burdens, years' worth of failed fertility attempts, and Jess's realization that Malcolm has been keeping something from her. She's been staying with a friend in Manhattan, but early on in the novel Malcolm learns that Jess has been spotted in Gillam with a fairly recent transplant: a divorced dad who is, like her, a lawyer.
Keane (Fever; Ask Again, Yes) dips into the minds of both Malcolm and Jess, who, while on the verge of leaving him, was tempted to point out that, as she saw it, "it was the first time in a long time that he'd paid attention to a single thing she did." The Half Moon is more capacious than the customary strained-relationship novel, accommodating unguarded considerations of how work, class, and ambition bear on a partnership. Keane traffics in naturalism, meting out carefully composed scenes bustling with Gillam folks, the central two of whom would have likely made a mess of their marriage anywhere. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer