Ask Again, Yes

The story of Anne Stanhope questions whether emotional problems and the tendency to commit violence result from genetic makeup or in reaction to emotional and psychological trauma. Anne had no control over three deeply troubling events: her mother’s suicide, the molestation she suffered as a teenager, and the stillbirth of her first child. She was conditioned by Irish culture and her upbringing to hide her troubles. Only through a strong therapeutic alliance does Anne finally begin to move toward authentic recovery.

Anne is both the victim and a product of psychological research that saw mental illness, whatever its root causes, as a medical condition that required hospitalization and prescription medication. She is treated like a patient who needs to be quarantined, contained, and medicated, an attempt to control her psychological problems rather than to address their root causes. In an institutional environment, Anne becomes more depressed, angry, and socially dysfunctional.

Whether or not people like Anne are predisposed to mental illness because of genetics, patients need to be treated with respect, to have their stories heard and examined, and to have their condition accepted by those around them. Anne may have been the character who ended up in the hospital, but most of the characters grapple with challenges like addiction and maladaptive behaviors. Only by being honest about their inner state do they find redemption and understanding.

As a novel of Irish Americans, Ask Again, Yes makes a deliberate literary allusion to the iconic closing chapter of Ulysses, James Joyce’s towering epic of Dublin street life, first published in 1922. In the closing 20 or so pages of Keane’s novel, the reader is given a cascade of yesses, offered in the course of both the narration and the characters’ conversations. On the last page alone, the word “yes” appears five times. The novel’s title is taken from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses.

Ulysses draws on multiple mythological templates to celebrate the joys and sorrows of Leopold and Molly Bloom, a lower middle class married couple struggling to find value in a life defined by the indignities of borderline poverty and an oppressive sense of boredom and routine. With a married life deformed by alcoholism and upended by infidelities, Molly has every reason to despair. In the novel’s final chapter—a single sentence unbroken by punctuation or paragraphing—Molly affirms the value of that sad and depressing life, defiantly embracing its sorrows, joys, mundane comedies, and low-rent tragedies. In a lush internal monologue that goes on for pages without paragraph breaks or punctuation, Joyce adds rhythm to the closing lines with a string of vibrant and robust yesses.

More than influencing the formal structure to the novel—Keane mimics Joyce’s technique of shifting narrative standpoints from section to section—Ulysses influences Keane’s thematic argument. Keane depicts the interrelated lives of middle-class Irish Americans struggling to find value and worth in their ordinary lives. Like Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, which celebrates rather than surrenders to a life of unavoidable problems and profound heartache, Ask Again, Yes finds a way to affirm both hope and joy.