The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright

There's a down to earth and relatable quality to Enright's writing which makes it so wonderfully engaging. It's a slight of hand which might initially conceal that the prose is very sophisticated and biting. “The Wren, The Wren” opens with a passage about the discomforting weirdness of inhabiting a body and consciousness which had me instantly chuckling in recognition. The story continues as a young woman named Nell relates the experience of unexpectedly falling in love. However, this is anything but a saccharine tale of romance as her relationship with a rural muscular lad turns into something that is both exciting and disturbing.

Her experiences show how love affairs and long term relationships involve varying degrees of power play – something which has been true for past generations of Nell's family as well. The narrative alternates between Nell's perspective and that of her no-nonsense mother Carmel who lives independently and has mostly avoided any committed romance. Both live with the spectre of Carmel's deceased father Phil McDaragh, a poet of moderate fame who abandoned his family and ill wife to move to America seeking more personal and professional success. His poems bookend Carmel and Nell's accounts. They're full of airy talk about love and nature. The more that's related about this family's history the more hollow and posturing they appear.

Phil gave Carmel the dubious honour of dedicating one of his poems to her. It's a kind of gift but it also cements his girl and his relationship to her as something removed from reality. Enright seems to be disentangling the illusion created by fame with both this novel and her previous book “Actress” showing how the creation of public image and representation can be very different from personal experience. But really this issue of the spotlight being cast on a certain individual highlights and exaggerates issues we all have concerning authenticity. Through these women's accounts we see how lived experience is precariously removed from perceptions and representations of it – especially when these come from a dominant man. In turn, this skews self perception. Over the course of their story Carmel and Nell gradually find greater clarity about themselves and their family. The drama disentangles the mythology which has been built around a masculine poet and patriarchal figure.

One of Nell's statements which continues to haunt me is when she recalls how whenever she wanted a present Carmel always gave her exactly what she asked for. What she hoped for was a surprise. This story shows how our relationships with each other don't thrive if we only play out our expected roles as a daughter or son or mother or father. Instead we have to see the person as they really are: a unique individual who is constantly changing and trying to figure their lives out. This novel presents a meaningful family story where connections and relationships are tested in these charismatic individuals' ongoing quest for self-fulfilment.

Actress by Anne Enright

I have a special fondness for novels that are about actresses/actors. Two of my favourite books are Joyce Carol Oates’ “Blonde” about the actress Norma Jean Baker who becomes the persona Marilyn Monroe and Susan Sontag’s “In America” about the Polish actress Helena Modjeska who helped found a utopian community in the late 1800s. I even wrote my MA dissertation on these novels and how both writers explore the borders between identity and performance in their stories. I also have a love for Anne Enright’s writing as few other current authors are able to write about family, love and national identity the way she can as exemplified in her previous novel “The Green Road” which is a fascinating depiction of all these things.

This means that “Actress” is the perfect novel for me and it fully delivered because I absolutely adored it. It’s told from the perspective of Norah, a writer who has written five novels and now feels ready to tell the story of her mother Katherine O’Dell who died at the relatively early age of 58. At the height of her mother’s career she was a great actress of Broadway and Hollywood and, at the lower end of it, found herself doing TV commercials and became the focus of a tabloid scandal. Though her mother’s star faded long ago and Norah herself is much older, the effects of that celebrity and the uneasy relationship it created between them are still something Norah wrestles with. In this story Norah tries to piece together a history of Katherine’s life and the real impact of her fame.

Something I find so engaging about Enright’s writing is that almost every sentence feels like it’s layered with a delicious form of irony. Norah’s backward glance at her childhood and Katherine’s life is coloured by this humorous point of view where certain things seem obvious now when they may have not been at the time. For instance, she understands now that her mother struggled with her finances though she continued to live as if she were affluent, many of the romantic men who hovered around her mother were in fact gay and when her mother made excuses for not spending time with her daughter after a show it was really because she wanted to be alone. These are things she probably intuitively knew at the time, but seeing things in retrospect makes them much clearer – or apparently so because it’s easy to place an interpretation on events which are long past. Nevertheless, I found Norah’s cynical tone about the whole artifice of fame and the theatrical world very amusing.

Part of Katherine’s struggle as an artist is that she finds herself typecast as embodying a certain romanticised view of old Ireland. Norah frequently comments on how Katherine feels pressured to uphold this image in her dress and dyed red hair. It’s upheld even more when her mother makes an advertisement for Irish butter which becomes infamous and Enright’s description of the over-the-top ad is hilarious. But it’s interesting how Katherine’s struggle to break away from this image also mirrors the country’s shifting politics and characters over the decades. Norah poignantly recounts her experiences during The Troubles and how these events make everything change but, at the same time, nothing changes: “A funny thing happens when the world turns, as it turned for us on the night we burned the British Embassy down. You wake up the next morning and carry on.” Through this story Enright gives a fascinating view on an evolving sense of what it means to be Irish.

I also really appreciate the dynamic way Enright writes about love and sex. The public endlessly speculate about Katherine’s sexual life as does Norah herself as she’s not entirely certain who her mother slept with or who her own father is. But the reader is drawn more into Norah’s own sexual history and relationship with sex as she describes her uninhibited views about it. When pondering the nature of sex she poignantly describes the complicated interplay between the imagination and reality and points out that there is a “difference between what happens in your head and what happens in the room. The big difference.” Interestingly, the novel is largely narrated in the second person as Norah is directing her recollections at her husband with whom she has a very complicated relationship.

Finally, I very much enjoyed the occasional commentary Enright makes about sleep and sleeplessness throughout the novel. She makes very relatable points about the inner struggle everyone has when waking up in the night and whether to go to the toilet or try to get back to sleep. I also liked her observation about how uncomfortable a bed feels when you’re trying to get to sleep but when you wake up in the morning it feels like the most comfortable place in the world. Enright excels at such pithy down-to-earth observations while also creating a larger family story with compelling ideas about identity. It’s what makes reading this author such an enriching and enjoyable experience.

The Green Road by Anne Enrigh

“The Green Road” begins in what feels like familiar territory for Anne Enright. A girl in rural Ireland experiences the tension in her household as her brother Dan declares he's going to become a priest and her mother Rosaleen retreats to her bedroom in a rage. This and a later scene that follows a world-weary older woman sitting alone in a big house looking out upon the landscape are poignant and beautifully-written characters. However, having read Enright's novels before, it's the kind of Irish character and atmosphere that I'd expect to find in a novel by her. BUT the novel then switches into an entirely different setting and group of characters which surprised and thrilled me. Progressing forward in time the story follows four siblings who take very different paths in life. Enright effectively and meaningfully portrays the lives of a closeted man in New York City when AIDS had a devastating effect upon the gay community in the early 90s, an embittered mother frightened she might have cancer, an aide worker in impoverished Mali and an alcoholic actress/young mother. This is a novel that has an astonishing scope. Using a unique form and range of voices, it comes together to say something brilliantly effective about the resilience of family no matter how dispersed they may become.

Although the family portrayed in this novel are very unique, Enright's special talent as a writer is making you feel as if they are your own or that you've lived alongside them their whole lives. The reader is only given snippets of each of their stories yet they have that familiarity which makes you care about them and understand their point of view. Each has their own faults and hopes and private miseries. Their observations range from the most painfully existential “How long would she have to continue, being like this. Being herself” to humorous observations about beauty and ageing “She never lost it. From a distance, if you keep the hump out of your back, you might be any age at all.” When they finally come together in the later part of the novel you are aware of the gravity of all their individual struggles while they interact with each other. It made me totally gripped to see how their stories would play out because their presence together felt so immediately real.

Gentian flowers which grow amongst the rocks near the family's home. 

“The Green Road” takes an unusual stance on the property crash in Ireland. Rosaleen summons her four children together to spend Christmas in her house in order for the family to say goodbye to the place before she sells it amidst the ridiculous inflation in housing prices. Enright writes that “The truth was that the house they were sitting in was worth a ridiculous amount, and the people sitting in it were worth very little.” Of course, the author doesn't really believe that. What she's suggesting is that each sibling has failed to achieve their ambitions in casting themselves out into the world. Whereas, ironically, the house has sat there all the time in its same semi-dilapidated state and acquired tremendous worth. It makes you wonder if once you find a place where you feel completely content, a known road which feels like the most beautiful in the world, is there any point seeking more in life? This is a stunning and profound novel that I absolutely loved reading. 

Books About Infidelity

I know. How romantic, right? I actually really love Valentine’s Day and consider myself an amorous person, but rather than post about the best couples in novels or most romantic books I wanted to pose a counterpoint to all the sugary sweetness. Relationships are complicated and nowhere is this more comprehensively explored than in novels. Here are three of my favourite books which deal with infidelity in a way that is intelligent and gives fully rounded points of view to all parties involved.

The Forgotten Waltz – Anne Enright

Without a doubt this is one of my favourite novels that I’ve read in the past few years. Enright has a sharp dry sense of humour and brilliantly gets at the raucous emotions surrounding infidelity. This novel is written from the perspective of the “other woman” as she comes to terms with the dynamics of her affair and the wedge she’s made between a father and his daughter. Her memories of passion come butting against the stark reality of her present. This novel is poetic, heart-wrenching and left me in tears.

The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton

Manners and decorum hide simmering passion. Nobody got this better than Wharton. Her prose delicately handle the growing emotion between a married man and the mysteriously oddball Countess. The reader can feel a strong sympathy for all the parties involved no matter how much you may want to cheer for Newland to leave his conventional wife for the woman he’s really drawn to. The novel itself has been somewhat eclipsed by the excellent Scorsese film but it’s well worth reading if you haven’t already.

The Painted Veil – W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham really knows how to put his adulteress through the wringer. Kitty marries too soon and realizes once she’s dragged away from her homeland to the far East by her new husband Walter that she’s made a terrible mistake. Her affair with a handsome and charming official can’t end well and it doesn’t. Rather than leave his wife, Walter gives her an ultimatum which could end in her death. This novel is both terrifying and brutal on its characters psyches showing how hard it is to discover what you really want in romance.

Do you have any favourite novels which deal with infidelity?