Book Review: 'Ask Me About the Money' by Keith Pilapil Lesmeister

I lived outside of Iowa through my 20s and always found myself lacking the language to explain the place that raised me. Now I have a point of reference. Ask Me About the Money (Cornerstone Press), Keith Pilapil Lesmeister’s new collection of short stories, is the illustration, elaboration, nuance and characters of my home.

There is no single thread or narrator that dictates something like an Iowan profile, but it is the effect that these 17 stories build as they are digested together that feels so correct to me. Lesmeister is a master of craft and voice — each story is distinct and has a singular lens. We meet people in rural and urban settings, children and elderly, estranged family and dispossessed loners, fighters and lovers and helpers and scrappy survivors and comfortable communities. These are the people who speak the language of flyover country.

The blurbs for this book all seem to note that the title is appropriate (and it is): “ask me about the money” is a declarative refrain that works like a flashbulb. All of the people within this collection’s pages are pushed and pulled by “cash, moolah, change, ching, cha ching. Butter, cheddar, cheese. End of the week, end of the month… Dough, bacon, bread.” Money is a throughline here, and Lesmeister presents it in a way that isn’t out of place or beyond the scope of reality. There is a timeliness to Lesmeister’s stories and his characters’ means of survival in a world governed by currency. Several of the stories take place decades in the past, but the money struggles remain all too familiar.

This book is grit and grief and, at its heart, it’s the purest kind of love letter. It holds a holistic understanding of its subject and embraces it, warts and all. Ask Me About the Money asks us what we have when we never win, what help means, and what it means to need or accept that help. It examines what work is, the legacies of our relationships and the patterns that shape us “like an irregular metronome, keeping inconsistent time to our ongoing maladies.”

Lesmeister’s talent for embodying his narrators is unparalleled — the age, era and emotional stakes are tangible in only a few words. A few sentences and we’re in the room with them, readying for the next shift, paint chipping or shoes glinting. Lesmeister understands that short fiction requires economy. They have no time to spare. These characters steal our attention, their stories stick to the ribs, knowing “we’ll only be here for a few minutes.”

When left to my own devices I often veer toward some sense of escape or whimsy. This moody cover and Lesmeister’s signature realism don’t fit that bill — but I’ve read Lesmeister before and I trusted that his stories would quickly rip into the heart of their subjects. Each story is a microcosm, an empathetic study of what it means to be a person and how we make our lives from the materials we’re given.

In one story, a character demands exactly what this collection required of me — that I “stay there until I feel something shift in my core, in my spirit.”