Tag: Anne Enright

Actress by Anne Enright

I love a first page. Page one of a book is like turning a corner in an art gallery and seeing the painting you’ve come all this way and spent all this money and used all this time to see. Enright on page one of Actress makes two things very clear about the first person narrator: she’s the daughter and she’s cynical.


And, yes, I have her eyes … indeed, whole paragraphs were penned about bog and field, when journalists looked into my mother’s eyes.

Not limpid pools, corn flowers, or the depth of her soul, but bog and field, which comes, fascinatingly enough, not at the end of the sentence but in the middle; I loved that, and had I not known anything about Anne Enright or her work and this book I’d picked at random from a bookshelf, that line alone would’ve demanded I buy it.
And then on page 7 this

…and I was already in love with you.

So it now appears that the daughter, Norah, is writing to someone. A lover, or seemingly, a past lover. A husband as it turns out.

However, I had to adjust my expectations; this is not a linear narrative, more like a cable-knit sloppy-joe of a book. Nameless and numberless chapters constructed as riffs on a memory, a character, an event with Norah sometimes daughter, sometimes omnipotent narrator. Character and place are important but not time; action and detail tumble over each other, Norah a child and then older than her mother would’ve been had she been alive. But anchoring everything is her mother, Katherine O’Dell, the famous Irish actress, but not her real name, and not Irish: she is her own self creation and from the moment she pops out of her mother, literally, on the most theatrical of sets: a staircase, to her most self-absorbed act, and the central event of the book, her shooting of Boyd O’Neill in the foot, she is a force.

Fundamentally it is a story of the interplay between stardom and domesticity told by Norah, a key player in both who is trying to understand how both came to make her the person she has turned out to be AND the truth about her mother.

One of the joys of Anne Enright’s writing is the writing itself. Here she describes her mother’s curtain call technique:

Her lingering, luvvie curtain call never changed – that clearing of her gaze as though realising the audience had been there – oh my goodness! – all along … It is all so surprising, Oh, there you are, a hand to the crowd. And, Yes! Here I am, the same hand at her breast.

(Although, her most memorable appearance, and the one that immortalised her, is not in a play or film but in a butter ad)

And here Norah describing one of her own sexual partners:

He had a way of swallowing a joke, with a little bobbing lift of his chin, as though agreeing with himself while tossing down a peanut.

The reader has all the freedom in the world to picture Enright’s characters in their size, clothes, and expressions but little descriptions of their eccentricities like this anchor them in your mind.

Detail has always been, and remains, the writer’s tool to elicit believability, but what works better is forgotten detail:

The ‘treatment’ [LSD] happened some time after the butter ad, apparently, but rack my brains though I might, I can not say it made any difference to her level of eccentricity at the time.

but then writing about not remembering something is detail nonetheless, just more effective.

This book is actually like a letter and like all letters it is in the 2nd person and it allows Enright to employ conversational aspects: asides, self-reflection, and pent up confessions. But it is also a novel and these peculiarities of letter writing could explain why the readers I’ve talked to said they didn’t like it or didn’t finish it, which is the same thing really, because they were expecting a story. But, although it isn’t written as a linear story, it is a story, and a satisfying one, you end up with, a bit like it’s a picture you end up with when you finish a jigsaw puzzle, you just don’t know what the story is while you’re reading it.

Enright’s last book The Green Road (2015) was her best thus far, although, surprisingly, it traced the same form and content of her Booker Prize winning novel, The Gathering (2007). Actress, is hewn with the same skills but it’s a very different creation, and I recommend those who didn’t finish it to try it again; just adjust your expectations.

Here is an interview with Enright talking about the creative process;

and here is an interview, back in March, hosted by Andrew O’Hagan for the London Review of Books about this work.

You can buy the book in various formats here.

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The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright

AnneEnrightAuthor pic 2
Irish Writer, Anne Enright. The Forgotten Waltz was the first book after her Booker prize: it doesn’t disappoint, although she goes on a  bit; but, I suppose you can do whatever you like after a Booker win.

Like The Gathering (2007), Enright establishes her story, this story, as having happened in the past but tells it in the present; or at least that seems to be the case as I finish page 1. I have a thing about page 1.

It is some years ago now. The house is new and this is my sister’s housewarming party …

Many readers I know have an aversion to narratives in the present tense but it gives the impression that the writer is telling you right now about a past event, but by telling it as if it is happening now gives the narrative the immediacy of gossip – and we all like gossip. It gives the reader a sense of it not having been written for you but of it being told to you, and only you, at this moment; even if the prose slips into the past at times.

They have mini-marshmallows on top. She goes to pop one in her mouth, then pulls back in surprise. 

‘Ooh, pink!’ she says.

I don’t know what I was waiting for. 

Not “I didn’t know what I was waiting for” (both verbs in the past) nor “I don’t know what I am waiting for” (both verbs in the present) but the first (do) in the present and the second (was) in the past.

It feels like there are two narratives going on here: the story itself (in the past) and the telling of it (in the present). But this is what I think we all do when we tell someone now about something that happened then, and by using this double-tense Enright is being conversational, conspiratorial, and so making us feel comfortable and special: a real friend. Readers love this.

I don’t think Enright is conscious of this nor does she sit down meticulously studying the verbs and deciding which tense they should be to get the effect she is after. My mentioning it is, however, a serious attempt to describe how a writer gets this conspiratorial, gossipy, tone into their writing. In order to get this particular tone the writer needn’t manipulate it- in fact, shouldn’t manipulate it –  but needs to be thinking in this particular tone so the tone in the head becomes the tone on the page.

Or you may think I’m being a wanker and why don’t I get on with it and just read the bloody thing? OK, I will.

On page one, line one, we are given the nut of it.

I met him in my sister’s garden in Enniskerry.

This is the first person account of a woman, Gina Moynihan, and her sexual obsession for a man, Sean Vallely, who like her, is married to someone else.

Enright writes Gina’s monologue as if she’s explaining, justifying at a crackling pace, to a … a … psychologist. She’s keen, this Gina, to tell us everything, but also to leave us guessing:

We managed to linger after everyone had gone, and the details of what corner we found and what we did; how we managed it, and who put what where, are nobody’s business but our own. 

and, of course, by NOT telling us the details our minds race frantically with all sorts of images of ‘doing it’ and ‘putting what where’ and in ‘whose corner’ and ‘managing it where?’ that we’re all in a lather anyway.

Her prose has a momentum that belies the action. There is action everywhere whereby reading it makes you feel exhausted; there’s a breathless tone to the reading, like a theatrical monologue some aspiring, or reviving, actor does of The Gospel According to Matthew. The Gospel According to Gina; where a simple static description is busy with verbs:

Lines of black posts marched down to the shoreline, small and smaller, overtaken, each in their turn by the shifting sand.” 

There’s ‘marching’ and ‘overtaking’ and ‘shifting’; so much happening, so many doing words, but it’s just the view of a bloody empty beach! The empty beach seems as busy as the sex in the corner.

Gina is self-possessed, or maybe just blind, but she has no thought that just as she has a keen sense of perspicacity other people might have a similar talent. She can see through everyone but she is certain no one can see through her. She thinks her secret is safe. This is the tension.

She’s not very likeable – in fact, I’d be very wary of having her at my lunch table, but you’re flattered that she’s confiding in you so much of what she’s thinking and feeling; it’s all so intimate, that you would have to admit your friendship with her even if only to bolster your own standing. Like admitting to a friendship with a Weinstein simply because he’s famous and he talked to you once.

There was a time when “Prefaces” or “Introductions” were mis-understood and not seen as part of the story – we couldn’t wait to get to Chapter 1, for the story to begin – which I think now has, thank god, changed, but Enright starts the book with a “Preface” that you MUST read as it pre-empts the story: Sean’s little troubled girl, Evie, sees Gina and he kissing and it is seen as the “first official occasion” of their love. Enright has used this devise – a child witnessing something very ‘adult’ – before, in The Gathering, and admits in an interview that after writing this preface scene says to herself,* “Oh God! I’ve done it again.”  But the pivotal scene is the pivotal scene and once it’s there, it must remain.

It’s not giving anything away to say that the book is about an affair; it’s not the affair, nor even its aftermath that interests Enright, what interests her is how Gina sees it, manipulates it, how a woman sees herself, loses herself, against a background of an Ireland where such a thing, not so long ago, would’ve been the end of her; the end of everything for her. It’s hard to think of the Ireland then, and the Ireland now with it’s same-sex marriage legislation, its abortion referendum (May 25, 2018), and it’s out, gay, Prime Minister of Indian parentage.

The affair is exciting, propelling, and with a momentum all of its own, because it isn’t, has nothing to do with, the domestic. The two adulterers – such a loaded term – know little about each other, hardly speak:

“All this. Have you done it before?”

“Well, you know,” he said.

Their affair progresses on “in its Friday pace,” and it’s this that Gina loves. It’s just about fucking every Friday. The ‘falling in love’ bit could ruin it all! But they do; or, at least. she does. The ‘wife’, Sean’s wife, Aileen, isn’t Gina’s nemesis, as one would expect, that role falls to Evie, Sean’s little ‘mistake’ of daughter. She’s enigmatic, chubby, but plain, and not at all healthy, but it’s the daughter that, if any atonement is to be got for Gina and her wild imagination – and all of it could just be that – then it will come via Evie; it’s Evie she also needs to woo.

This is the third Enright I’ve read in a row: an Enright-fest. She has rocketed to the top, well, near the top, of my favourite-writer list: Colm Tóibín still holds my #1 place although Enright, John Boyne, Patrick Gale, and Sebastian Barry are barking at his heels. She says she doesn’t know what she will write next; she’ll find out, I’m sure, and do it. Soon, I hope.

You can purchase the book, in various formats, here.

* The presenter and interviewer are a little boring, fast forward through them to get to the good bits: Enright, herself.

 

 

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The Gathering by Anne Enright

 

Anne Enright pic
“None of the Irish writers I know are afraid of the pleasure of the sentence.”

If you read the blurb on the back cover you’d get the idea that this is a book about a family gathering for a funeral;  and, like me, you’d think you know what it’s about – it seems such a cliched reason for a book – but the actual ‘gathering’ doesn’t happen until Chap 30 (out of 39) and a lot of fabulous stuff happens before chap 30. This book has been unread on my shelf for four years because I thought I knew what it would be like. I was wrong.

Enright has employed this same idea recently in The Green Road, although in that book the event is a house-sale;  but still a family gathers. Anne Enright is big on families.

And this is Anne Enright on big Irish families:

There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered with, as a child. There is always a colossal success, with several houses in various countries to which no one is over invited. There is a mysterious sister. These are just trends of course, and, like trends, they shift . Because our families contain everything and, late at night, everything makes sense. We pity our mothers, what they had to put up with in bed or in the kitchen, and we hate them or we worship them, but we always cry for them – at least I do. The imponderable pain of my mother, against which I have hardened my heart. Just one glass over the odds and I will thump the table, like the rest of them, and howl for her too.

Both these books, The Green Road and The Gathering are similar in structure. She places an event at the nut of her tale and weaves around it threads of people, their plights and joys, pasts and presents until you have something like a doily of a story. A weave of narratives around a perfect whole. In one masterful chapter two of her characters, Ada Merriman, the narrator’s grandmother, and the man, Lambert Nugent, who has always loved her, and who she should’ve loved, but didn’t, touch. She a hand on his shoulder, he a hand on her hip; and the narrator, a writer, the granddaughter, Veronica, who admits to writing all this down, describes what might have happened had both their hands moved a little further, a little more truthfully until they were on the floor with him inside her. The reader certainly wants this to happen and Enright, having us in mind, gives it to us. It’s satisfying. It didn’t happen in the story, only on the page, but satisfying nonetheless.

Hovering above for most of the book, like a drone, is the little mystery Enright, (Veronica?) tells us in the very first line: something happened in Ada’s house when Veronica was eight and her brother, Liam, the corpse at the centre of this doily, was nine. Something happened that little Veronica shockingly saw.

The Hegertys are a big clan: the nine surviving children, there were more births than survivors, gather for the funeral of one of their own and Veronica needs to bare witness to an uncertain event. She remembers it but as something so improbable – she was very young -way outside her, then, experience that now, as an adult, it’s entirely possible, she thinks, that it might not have happened at all.

the Gathering Booker pic
Pleased as punch; and rightly so.

The Hegertys were “dragged-up”. They were entirely “free range”. But this is all pre-80s, pre-parenting, pre-how-to books, pre-child murders, pre-4-wheel-drives to school; pre-dry cleaning plastic as death-bags: pre-fear, when us baby-boomers were all “free-range”, and all “dragged up.” If you are over 50 you probably know what this is like. 
Anne Enright writes sentences chock-full of meaning, or insight, or revelation; and even her linking sentences between chock-full sentences are chock-full. But then she throws in a little doosey: It is like Christmas in Hades, and I laugh and think she is going to suck the universe dry of all the good lines leaving us in her wake scrabbling for left-overs.
She uses dialogue to re-assure us that these people are complicated, but real:
‘Thanks,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Thanks for staying with me.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
‘No. Really.’
‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
and prose for more meaningful and ‘under-the-surface’ revelations:
I thought about this, as I sat in the Shelbourne bar – that I was living my life in inverted commas. I could pick up my keys and go ‘home’ where I could ‘have sex’ with my ‘husband’ just like lots of other people did. This is what I had been doing for years. And I didn’t seem to mind the inverted commas, or even notice that I was living in them, until my brother died.
The doily book, The Green Road, was written in 2014, and it’s a book Enright calls “more of a proper book” insinuating that the other doily book, this one, The Gathering, written in 2006, is not. I know what she means. The Green Road is tighter, neater, more confident, and adventurous, the pattern more stable; this one is loose, equally compelling and recognisable, but free-range and at the same time narrow in its world; but for lovers of contemporary literary fiction, so rewarding.
So, yes, a lot happens to Veronica, the narrator, before the point of it all; and near the end the mystery is revealed; then the gathering itself; but Enright keeps a little ‘gasp’ to send you off into the last little chapters when, by the end, you realise it was all, not about a family, but about a woman, coming to turns with hers:
God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love but love all the some.   
I’ve never read another author’s work back to back before. I have another Anne Enright book on my shelf: The Forgotten Waltz (2011); that might be next. It’s turning into a little Anne Enright Reading Frenzy. Read her yourself and see why.
You can find The Gathering in various formats, including audible and audio CD, here.
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The Green Road by Anne Enright

Anne Enright pic
Irish writer, Anne Enright, won the Man-Boooker Prize for The Gathering (2007)

After the last page is turned, after you’re full to overflowing with this book you’ve just read, Anne Enright writes an Acknowledgements page, and she starts it like this: Thanks for the information used and cheerfully misused in this book are due to: and she lists a whole swag of people. That is the branding mark of a writer: once she knows something, then and only then, can she choose to change it.

With the very first sentence she grounds the story in the domestic:

Later, after Hanna made some cheese on toast, her mother came into the kitchen and filled a hot water bottle from the kettle on the range;

but it’s the very first word ‘later’ that made me jump: what?, this uncertainty, tension; something happened before the cheese on toast and the filling of the hot water bottle. But what was it? What?

And then on the 2nd page, this

He took them for rides in fast cars, up over the bridge, bang, down on the other side.

It’s the word, ‘bang’ that hit me this time. With that one out-of-place word, not a word, a sound; no quotation or exclamation marks, nothing but surety about the picture it conjured: a too-fast car, over a bump, where you hit your head on the roof and the sound of the car bouncing back to earth with the woop and cheer of kids, out where they shouldn’t be. Such a big picture from such a small sentence.

I smile to myself and think: I’m in the hands of a master, and I breathe a little sigh of relief: a very good feeling at the start of a read..

But then Chapter 2 opens 11 years later in the East Village, New York, with a gay male narrator among gay men torn between their right to be promiscuous and a stalking, discriminating death.

What Billy wanted was big, shouty unafraid sex with someone who did not cry, or get complicated, or hang around after the orange juice and the croissant. Billy was across the threshold and cheerfully out and he wanted men who were basically like him; sweet guys, who lifted weights and fucked large, and slapped you on the shoulder when it was time to swap around.

 Where did an Irish 50-something mother of 2, who looks like a little housewife from Central Casting, find authentic language like that? I was now severely impressed with this writer; and she can do that relaxed but spiky gay table-talk; sassy, arch, and funny.

I don’t want to give too much away because there is too much to enjoy about this novel; but it is neatly constructed. Divided in two, the first half assigns a chapter, each with a different narrator, at a different time for each of the four beautiful children of the difficult woman Rosaleen; and at the end of which is the reason that all of them are lured home to Ireland, County Clare, for Christmas in the family home that their prickly mother has decided to sell.

Bring on Part 2.

In a London Review Bookshop interview she describes the first half of the book, a ‘proper’ book, as getting to know the four siblings in a way that none of them could ever know about each other; in a sense this is dramatic irony on a large scale. We readers know more about each of them than any other family member knows about each other. They have gone off elsewhere (New York, Asia, Africa, Dublin) to care for, or sleep with, the lost, the undernourished and come back home full of themselves, their adult selves; but to the childhood home where their mother, Rosaleen, is waiting to be empathised with. That’s all she’s ever wanted. They go off to look after big-bellied African babies, or dribbling disease-ridden men but here she is not being looked after at home … alone. She has a point. The trouble it she doesn’t know how to accept it, or express it.

I foolishly avoided Anne Enright’s books, even though there they were on my bookshelf, and even though I’ve met the woman (twice!), I thought her books were all about families collected together at a funeral, a wedding, a last Christmas, and I thought, yes, I know what they’re like. I’ll get to them … one day. And this book is like that. Exactly like that; but at the same it is so unexpected, unpredictable and therefore rewarding, satisfying, and oh-so wise.

She got her hair done in a place so posh it didn’t look done at all,

and this is one of those rare books where you can believe what’s written on the cover: ‘brilliant’, ‘radical’ – don’t let that put you off, ‘beautiful’, ‘virtuosic’, and ‘hugely readable.’

I sincerely wish this book on everyone.

You can find the book in various formats here.

 

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