Sometimes, against my better judgment, I’ll type some rankling concern into Google. “Sleeping hip pain?” “Sad always on Wednesday?” “Laptop way too hot?” Most of the time, autofill assures me that a chorus of other users have shared this predicament; it is neither unfixable nor unique. But for the occasional search, even an algorithmic process as vast and powerful as autofill can’t predict how my question should resolve itself.
Worse than a WebMD cancer diagnosis or the graphic advice in an obscure Reddit thread is an endless list of results that don’t quite see what I’m getting at. In “Ask Me Again,” her debut novel, Clare Sestanovich dwells in that ambiguity, seeking community in shared questions that may not have answers. “Ask Me Again” opens with a morbid meet-cute: Eva, a middle-class Brooklyn high school student, encounters Jamie, a wealthy Manhattan private schoolboy, at a hospital where she is visiting her grandmother and he his alcoholic brother (illness and death trample over class lines).
Eva’s grandmother, Adele, has just attempted suicide. Though Adele has been devoutly Catholic her whole life, she is now widowed, incontinent and alone: God has betrayed her. The doctors try to explain away her misery with brain tangles or plaque, but Adele insists that “she was not confused – she was furious.
” Knopf “Ask Me Again” By Clare Sestanovich Knopf. 304 pages. $28 The void awaiting Adele at the end of her life becomes the engine of.
