Life upon the wicked stage can be a trial

I picked up Anne Enright's new novel Actress although I'd never heard of the author or the book. I did not read the flap copy although I did look at the back cover praise, which told me Enright is a Man Booker Prize winner so how much of a risk was I taking? 

Coming to a book or a movie without having read the reviews means you come to it almost naked although not entirely because if Enright is a prize winner and has published ten books she has to have something. But this new novel, was entirely fresh to me and I read it perhaps the best way, without expectations, without assumptions. 

By writing this, I am, to some extent, taking the edge off your opportunity to experience the same pleasure. But I'm going ahead in the hope you'll read Actress anyway.

It is a novel in the form of a memoir. The narrator is an Irish woman, Norah FitzMaurice, who is a novelist writing about her actress mother, Katherine O'Dell. One of the many reasons I like the novel is because Enright ignores the advice for how to write a novel: inciting incident followed by rising action reaching a climax and denouement. I'm not sure Actress has a plot any more than any life has a plot.

Enright, writing from Norah's point of view throughout explores, Kate's history, her grandparents' history, her own sexual and romantic history, Ireland's recent history with Bloody Sunday and The Troubles in Northern Ireland. There is no father and that's one of the threads the author uses to pull readers through the book. Will Norah discover her father?

Another thread—and this is hardly a spoiler because it appears on page 16 at the end of the first chapter—is Katherine's shooting film producer Boyd O'Neill in the foot. By that time she does it, Katherine has been a star in American movies, on Broadway, on Dublin stages, and on Irish television (most famous for appearing in a classic Irish butter commercial.)

Because Norah seems to share characteristics with Enright ("I have written five novels . . ." p249; "Anne Enright is the author of five novels . . . " flap copy), and because the writing is so particular, so vivid, and so apt would be easy to believe that Norah is Enright thinly disguised despite the author's disclaimer. But, as Enright said in a 2008 interview, "My father is a retired civil servant—my mother is also a retired civil servant but she retired very early after she got married." So Katherine O'Dell—beautiful, sparkling, careless—is not Enright's mother.

But who cares? It is some kind of fallacy to confuse an author with her character. You read Actress for passages like this: "He was the kind of man who always knew better than the person he was speaking to. Boyd love an inaccuracy, because an inaccuracy could render everything else you said void. It was just a trick. And the copyright trick was another trick. As his authority began to fall apart for me, I see him as a series of half-lies and, perhaps frightened, manipulations, he was always ahead of you, Boyd . . . "

Another pleasure of the book is Enright's description of marriage: "In the morning, I can tell without opening my eyes where the window is, and if it faces the dawn. I sweep my hand in an arc across the sheet to find you recently gone, a thermal ghost in the cotton. Or the bed is cold. Or I bump agains you, a slight shock of skin roughened by hair and you do not stir. I leave my hand there until you wake. There is a moment of silence. Of silent wakefulness. And then you turn. It always amazes me. Even though I have dragged you from your dream, you are pleased to see me there. It feels like forgiveness, every time."

How wonderful to read about a woman who has been married for thirty years and is still in love with her husband. I'm glad Katherine O'Dell was not my mother, but I'm glad Enright created her.