Mary Beth Keane Traces the Irish Diaspora in 'Whale Harbor'

Mary Beth Keane's fifth novel, Whale Harbor (Scribner), opens in 1963 in an Irish-speaking village in Connemara and follows eleven brothers across Ireland, England, Montana and New York. The book took root, Keane said, in the last days of her father's life.

"I hate to start on a sad note but this story took root for me just after my father died in 2022," Keane told interviewer Jane Ciabattari. In hospice care, his dementia so pronounced that he reverted to Irish, the language his daughters do not speak. When her uncles translated, they found him fixated on a decision he had made in 1963, soon after his own mother died. Emigrating to America at nineteen, he had promised a younger, motherless brother he would bring him to New York within a few years. The brother ran away instead. Keane learned only in her father's final days how deeply the guilt still held him.

How much of the novel is family history?

Two central events come directly from Keane's life: her grandmother's death a few weeks after giving birth to her eleventh child, and an uncle who ran away at thirteen. No family member ended up in Montana, but an uncle spent thirty years working on the Alaska pipeline, and some of Mac's Montana impressions borrow from his visits to New York. Keane sent Mac to Montana because her father held a deep lifelong interest in the state, a trip she regrets never arranging.

The rest is invention. "Once I began writing this family they quickly moved away from their real-life inspirations and became entirely themselves," Keane said. Matching real life more closely would have left her feeling constrained.

How does one manage eleven brothers?

The sleeping arrangements alone required cartography: the five "oldests" in the loft, the four "babies" below, the newborn with the parents. Naming eleven children felt overwhelming, Keane admitted. Her anchor was Coleman, sixth of eleven, who stays close to home because of developmental delays that went unhelped at the time. "He is innocent and deeply kind and I thought of him as the heart of the family," she said. The reader is meant to sense the boys' presence and their separate griefs without tracking every speaker.

Keane chose close third person, narrated through Mac, the second eldest. "I can see things about a character—in this case Mac—that he can't see about himself," she said. First person, in her own writing, "has always felt a little insincere."

What does grief look like on the page?

Mac's mother dies soon after delivering Vincent, the youngest. The overwhelmed father, a postal worker, sends sons away and marries Nuala, a woman returned from Chicago. Keane refuses to name the emotions directly. "I don't think it's ever a good idea to describe an emotion in fiction," she said. Instead she watches characters act. "We'll know that when a character does this or that small thing, that's grief. All the things we say and do mean themselves but also something else."

The immigrant grief, too, is personal. Keane, a first-generation American, grew up eavesdropping on her parents' stories. Her father was second eldest of eleven siblings, all of whom emigrated to New York; her mother was seventh of nine. By 1982, as the novel records, overstaying a tourist visa no longer worked for the Irish, and the youngest brother, Vincent, had to fly to Canada and cross the border in a car trunk. "There is a kind of grief that's just baseline in the new immigrants I knew growing up," Keane said.

The whale of the title grew in significance as she drafted. It draws the village together in the opening section, then became connective tissue between the novel's leaps in time. Research, Keane insists, was minimal. Almost every family story she ever heard was set in Ireland in the 1960s, so the village was already complete in her imagination.

Her next project remains undefined. She has characters and scattered scenes but no outline, and she does not know yet what they share.