WHALE HARBOR

Based in part on her own family’s history, Keane’s latest novel tracks the lives of the 11 Joyce brothers, many of them departing a remote corner of Connemara, Ireland, for the United States.

With his oldest brother, Sean, working in England, it falls to second-oldest son Macdara, 16, to take on a leadership role when their mother dies shortly after giving birth to her last child, Vincent, in 1963. The boys’ obstinate father, Cathal, is often and unpredictably absent, so Mac does his best to hold things together until Cathal reappears with some hasty solutions—a new wife, Nuala; 14-year-old Barry to join Sean; Vincent to stay permanently with a cousin; and two other sons sent to a seminary school. The remaining boys respond differently to Nuala, the young ones clingy, but 9-year-old Rian rebellious. When Mac decides to accept an opportunity to work in Montana, he must break the promise he’d made to Rian—“I won’t leave you here alone”—consoling himself that he’ll earn enough money to send for Rian later. But the promise remains unfulfilled, haunting Mac through the coming years as his U.S. life expands, and Rian runs away at age 13 and disappears. Keane’s outstanding ability to encompass family feeling in fluid, translucent prose—as she did in Ask Again, Yes (2019)—shines once more in this saga of immigration and lifelong emotional bonds. Her opening portrait of existence in an obscure, impoverished outpost of the old country is lit with memorable detail: “There was a bowl of eggs on the table, and next to it a pile of dried seaweed.” The boys are unaccustomed to shoes and cutlery; a whale carcass washed up on the beach comes to symbolize, among other things, what will endure among the Joyces. Decades will pass and new generations arrive, but those blood connections, even when long neglected, are ineradicable.

Epic yet intimate, with a long, satisfying afterecho.