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Fiction
Clare Sestanovich’s Characters Are Book-Smart and Bored
Her first novel, “Ask Me Again,” follows a young woman from high school in New York City to an elite university, to her early adulthood among the political class in Washington, D.C.
Andrew Martin is the author of the novel “Early Work” and the story collection “Cool for America.”
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ASK ME AGAIN, by Clare Sestanovich
Clare Sestanovich’s debut story collection, “Objects of Desire” (2021), introduced readers to a formally accomplished writer whose style calls to mind alienated, realist forebears such as Ann Beattie, Richard Yates and Mary Gaitskill.
Her subject matter, too, is squarely old-school New Yorker (where she used to be an editor, and where several of her stories have been published). Her protagonists are often well educated but stifled: by relationships, jobs and lives that aren’t as interesting as they hoped they would be. “On the other side of the door, the party sounded like every other party” is a not-untypical observation.
Sestanovich’s first novel, “Ask Me Again,” is tonally of a piece with her short fiction, following the book-smart, emotionally tentative Eva from high school in New York City to her first years out of college. Eva’s slow but consistent upward trajectory from a prestigious, Yale-like university to a “boring internship at an exciting newspaper” in Washington, D.C., is contrasted with the troubled journey of her friend Jamie, who is brilliant, wealthy and perhaps, like one of Salinger’s Glass siblings, too loosely tethered to the material world for his own good.
While Eva muddles through an on-again off-again relationship with Eli, an aspiring politician and future communications director for a young congresswoman from New York who looks a lot like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamie struggles at a school upstate “for good kids with bad habits,” moves into Eva’s childhood bedroom in Brooklyn for a long stretch and becomes deeply involved in a social-justice-oriented storefront church.
Each of these elements makes sense intellectually — the novel is insistently concerned with different ways of being “of use” to the world — but the proportions are off. The first half of the book is a staid bildungsroman about the loneliness of elite achievement; think Elif Batuman’s “The Idiot” with fewer jokes. The second half is filled with incidents — the congresswoman becomes a central figure and a source of romantic intrigue; Jamie is involved in a deadly warehouse fire; there’s a mass shooting at a high school in Queens — that can feel both peripheral and not quite real.
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