Take the green road on a rewarding journey

Anne Enright's 2015 novel The Green Road, is the story of an Irish family, Rosaleen Madigan and her four children; Constance, Dan, Emmet, and Hanna. 

The first chapter is set in 1980 in Ardeevin, County Clare, an invented town, and told from twelve-year-old Hanna's point of view. We are introduced to the family and the crisis when Dan announces that he wants to be a priest, sending Rosaleen to her bed in tears.

The next chapter is dated 1991, sent in New York, and is Dan's. He has barely admitted he's gay and we're in the middle of the AIDS epidemic. This chapter, unlike Hanna's, is narrated by an unidentified observer; it begins, "We all thought Billy was with Greg . . . ." We who? But we're with Dan and his lovers.

Next it's 1997 in County Limerick and Constance's point of view. She is married to a successful businessman, has three children, and a lump in her breast. We learn about her relations with her husband, her parents, and her siblings as she visits a clinic to establish that the lump is benign.

Now it's 2002 in Ségou, Mali, and we're with Emmet. Ségou is a town and an urban commune in south-central Mali on the River Niger. (I had to look it up.) He and Alice, the woman he lives with, work for NGOs. "Alice was working on child mortality. Children were hard." Mali is also hard: "Thousands of miles on dust roads, and gravel roads, and potholed tarmac: roads that turned into rivers, or forest, or crowded marketplaces; roads you drove beside because the road was so bad."

In 2005, back in Ardeevin, we're with Rosaleen who is now seventy-six, her husband long dead. It's November and Rosaleen is writing Christmas cards. Dan in Canada, Emmet in Africa. Hanna in Dublin. Constance visits to drop off groceries. There is mother-daughter tension, and Rosaleen silently tells her: Lose some weight. "It was very aging—fat. It made her daughter look like an old woman, which was a kind of insult, after all the care that was put into the rearing of her." 

And after Constance has left and Rosaleen considers the house, the furnishings (her own parents' marriage bed remains upstairs), and the family, she decides to sell the house. Which brings the four children, spouses, grandchildren back to the house for Christmas.

It's a fraught holiday. Emmet "could see the next couple days stretch out in front of them. There would be much talk about house prices, how well Dessie McGrath [Constance's husband] was doing, what everything was worth these days—more expensive than Toronto, Dan, yes, that cowshed down the road. Emmet would start an argument with Constance about the Catholic Church—because Constance, who believed nothing, would not admit as much in front of her children who were expected to believe everything or at least pretend they believed it, just like their mother. Hanna would have a rant about some newspaper critic, their mother would opine that these people sometimes knew what they were talking about, and on they all would go. It was, Emmet thought, like living in a hole in the ground."

One could read the first four chapters as short stories, linked by family connections but separate in time and place. They make up Part One, "Leaving." 

Part Two, "Coming Home," takes place in 2005, and the chapters are identified by location: Toronto, Dublin, Shannon Airport, County Dublin, The Green Road ("a real road that runs through the Burren in County Clare)—except when they're not.

Enright is able to somehow make Rosaleen and her children both individual and engaging—flawed but sympathetic, even Hanna who is an alcoholic and careless. Enright doesn't emphasize it, but 2005 was almost the peak of the Irish boom. She writes about significant events in her characters' lives with details that build and build and build until they come not to a conclusion, not to a comforting wrapping-up but a rich and satisfying ending. 

I'd like to know how she does it.  

Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way

Last month I reviewed Anne Enright's most recent novel, Actress. I thought it was so terrific I looked up her novel The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. I don't know what it was competing against, but it is, in my opinion, another terrific novel. 

The Gathering is narrated throughout by Veronica Hagarty, the 38-year-old wife of Tom, Dublin resident and native, mother of two girls, and a middle child among of a dozen Hagarty children. Her next-older brother Liam has killed himself by walking into the English Channel off Brighton, England, with his pockets filled with stones. Liam is eleven months older, which suggests something about the family, as does the mother's seven miscarriages. 

The clan gathers in Dublin for Liam's funeral, thus the title. And that, essentially, is the plot: Liam dies, Veronica collects his body, there's a funeral. So how does Enright fill 261 pages?

With razor-sharp details and an unrolling family history that is unique and universal. Examples chosen at random of the first: 

—She puts her hand on the bakelite handle [of the kettle] as the bubble thicken against the chrome, and she lifts it, still plugged in, splashing some water in to heat the pot. 

—I liked the curve to his top lip, and the way his suit hung open as he leaned over to talk to me, the dent in his chest as he stooped, the mixture of arrogance and inclination.

—We had a double act about Ernest's ordination, the horrible yellow soles of his feet as he lay prostrate on the altar, the sight of our mother, when all the voodoo was done, tottering across to dress him in his robes, and then later, at a sort of wedding reception, the two of them cutting the cake together, my brother and my mother, and kissing when it was done.

—[Her brother Mossie] didn't mind sitting with us, he said, and we could talk as much as we like, but he would not abide the noise of the foot being mashed up in our mouths, and any slurps, even the slightest squelch, would get you a thump across the side of the head.

The Gathering is a family chronicle, possibly true, possibly invented. It is a novel after all, so presumably it's all invented. Yet Enright does her best to persuade us that what we're reading is true. (I wonder how we would respond to the book if the author were 'Veronica Hagerty'?) Enright does this by questioning her own narrative. The book's first sentence reads, "I would like to write down what happened in my grandmother's house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen." We have an unreliable narrator who acknowledges up front that she may be unreliable.

Nevertheless, Veronica is engaging, dependable (she sows wild oats but is faithful to her husband), intelligent. With Liam's death, she is trying to make sense of her life as an individual, as a sister (Liam was her closest sibling, although by the end she could barely tolerate him), as a wife, and as a mother. "I do not want a different life," says Veronica at the book's end. "I just want to be able to live it, that's all."

Lucky are the readers who live with her for the 261 pages of The Gathering.

And now, for another point of view

I never read reviews of a book I'm reviewing until I finish my review (if then). I do of course look at the promotional material and the blurbs the publisher has managed to obtain. For one thing, I want to know whether I am an appropriate critic for the book at all.

For example: "CIA Operative, Roger O'Neil goes deep undercover in Russia and teams up with a group of SAS Soldiers amidst a growing nuclear threat against America and a ruthless killer stalking them from the shadows" is not a book I should be reviewing. 

Nor is this: "Boy meets girl … boy dies … boy's brain is uploaded into a computer … together they explore the real meaning of love . . . a second chance through a secret government agency . . . the lovers embark on a journey of discovery as they explore the meaning of life, hope, courage . . ." I am afraid my willingness to suspend disbelief is not willing—perhaps unfairly—to accept this premise. 

When I thoroughly enjoy a book, however, I do occasionally look up the one- and two-star reviews on Amazon. If I think the book was so terrific, why doesn't everyone? Have I missed something? 

I've just given an enthusiastic review of Anne Enright's Actress, but not everyone agrees with my endorsement:

—"The prose was very disjointed, and the characters were like caricatures. I found myself not really caring what happened to any of them."

—"This is my first novel by this writer. I find I’m not really invested in most of the characters and it’s kind around so much between different generations I’m getting lost. I think also the skipping around breaks the emotional connection tonight [sic] story. Not really interested in finishing. But will try."

—"Having read Enright's previous work, I was looking forward to reading an insightful, wry, beautifully written novel. It is, instead, an insipid People magazine inspired look at a daughter with a famous actress for a mother. Oh the suffering. Men in the apartment. Drinking. Self-involved mother. Mother who seems to win the competition for cutest in the family. It was unreadable. There were hints everywhere that maybe the mother wasn't an actress but the writer Edna O'Brien and the author is imagining being the daughter Ms. O'Brien never had. In any case, don't bother. It's juvenile, repetitive (endless telling of parties and disappointments) and dull."

I didn't catch the O'Brien hints, but even if they are valid, I don't see how it diminishes Enright's novel. Indeed, if Actress is an evocation of Edna O'Brien's life by her imaginary daughter, it raises my opinion of the book another notch or so.

—"This is such a disappointment. Feels like Enright, usually such a gorgeous, fearless writer, could have penned this in her sleep. This subject doesn't remotely capture her talent, her usual ferocity or wicked humor. It's a long-winded, conventional account of an actress's silly, uninvolving life, told by her daughter. I barely recognize Enright in it. Surprisingly, disappointingly dull."

Clearly these last two people and I have different ideas of what is dull. They imply Enright's earlier work is more insightful, wry, beautifully written, gorgeous, and fearless when I thought Actress's prose was splendid. As I said in my review, I'd never heard of Enright, but with these endorsements I'll be checking out her other books. Watch this space. 

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.