She slowly deleted the letters of his name. Keane excels at moments of interior deliberation - for instance, when Jess hesitates before sending Neil an irreverent text (she barely knows him, after all): “Something told her to pause, to think for a second. Both Malcolm and Jess have had near-transgressions over the course of their marriage, but this feels more serious. They exchange tentative, searching texts that skirt the line between appropriate and illicit. Whether it’s the appeal of a ready-made family or the result of her growing distance from Malcolm, Jess feels a pull toward Neil.

This is where she meets Neil Bratton, a divorced father who has moved to town with three very young children. To make matters worse, he completes the transaction without consulting a lawyer (“out of respect” for Hugh). Malcolm has also bought the building without consulting Jess, and this decision is a fault line in their relationship. Malcolm has bought the bar from the elusive Hugh, who has an odd chip on his shoulder about Malcolm’s father having owned a more successful bar in Manhattan years ago. We see them again six and a half years later, when they have been buffeted by the many indignities of middle age: the thousand cuts of relentless bills, student loans, not making partner, fertility treatments. Seven years later, Malcolm and Jess decide to try for a baby and find it’s not as easy as they had thought. Young and in love, they decide to marry, only to suffer a miscarriage. During the first heady months of their relationship, Jess finds herself pregnant.

They met when she was home for a visit and Malcolm, who was already working at the bar and earning money, made the students surrounding Jess “look like little boys.” A law school friend cautions Jess that “with Malcolm, Jess’s boundaries would always be Gillam’s” - but, infatuated, she plunges ahead. Malcolm is very good-looking, “beautiful, still” - “the kind of man who’d get better with each passing year” - and Jess is attractive and endlessly intelligent she went to law school and works in the city. The Gephardts are a certain type of couple, “the prom king and queen,” Jess’s friend tells her. Malcolm mans his slowly failing bar, the Half Moon, in their hometown, Gillam, unable and unwilling to give up on his dream, and Jess has left him to go live temporarily with a friend in nearby New York City. When we meet Malcolm and Jess Gephardt, their marriage is in a sludgy stage of dissolution, a casualty of hasty decisions, imprudent judgments and exhaustion. The experience of reading Mary Beth Keane’s absorbing new novel, “The Half Moon,” feels - pleasantly - like breathing, or maybe just living.

Fever a novel by mary beth keane