Anne Enright

This is billed as a family-saga, but it often feels more like a linked-short-story sequence, as the viewpoint switches between Rosaleen Madigan and her four children in a series of extended vignettes spread over some twenty-five years. Even when she brings the family together, three-quarters of the way through, they all still seem to be living in their own bubbles, and the book is often more about what people don't tell each other than about how they interact.

But the vignettes are all very show more finely realised, with lots of telling observation: Enright is clearly up there with Alice Munro when it comes to short stories, and it almost seems like an irritating distraction that we have to map all these disparate people together into a coherent novel.

Enjoyable and rewarding. show less

In Enright's fourth novel, Veronica Hegarty mourns her brother who committed suicide by walking into the sea at Brighton. As Veronica broods she creates portraits of all her family with a reality that is startling although she is the first to admit that her memory may be faulty. Enright does not hold back on earthy metaphors or boorish sex but never sinks to mindless coarseness. Her first-rate writing sparkles with insight and acumen, although not everyone is comfortable with her particular show more kind of merciless narrative. show less

The Wren, The Wren is a slender book to cover three generations in Ireland, but that it does. The family we come to know begins with Phil McDaragh, a prize-winning Irish poet who wins fame and celebrity in his lifetime, but who abandons his family when his wife gets breast cancer. Carmel anchors the next generation while her sister labors in nursing and academia. Carmel spends her life alone, mostly by choice, with the exception of her only lasting love, her daughter. Carmel’s daughter show more Nell, like Phil, makes a career in writing, mostly as an influencer with a good following. All of them struggle with love, rejecting possibility again and again. In a way, it’s a story of one man wreaking damage down through the generations.

But Phil McDaragh offered more than damage. He loved Carmel and wrote to her and creating a poem to honor her. She wavers between love and hate for her father. She certainly cannot trust men so she never gives them a chance to hurt her deeply. Carmel loves her daughter Nell and is happy she needn’t share her with her father, an old lover who likely will never know he fathered Nell. Nell thinks of herself as socially awkward and she goes through a series of unsatisfying men, obsessing for a time about a cruel man. This all seems a repetition of behavior poisoning the generations but can she find a way home to a place she can love happily?

The Wren, The Wren is a beautiful book. Anne Enright writes with language that paint vivid pictures, but she’s not creating some Elysian field or glorious Otherworld. In fact, her writing is very much rooted in this world and its realities. For example, Carmel observes a beautiful zucchini flower, but what truly delights her is the how it looks as though the flower is excreting the zucchini. I love Carmel.

I read this book very slowly. When the story shifted from one character to another, I took a break. There were so many ideas I had to pause, read something else and come back after mulling on her ideas for a while. There was just so much to enjoy, like a rich and decadent chocolate torte. You cannot eat it all at once.

Some of her themes are quite simple, that empathy is how we bridge the spaces between us. Others quite complex, such as the idea that “the pain makes you feel accused of making pain up.” There is also an ongoing contrast between the urban life and the rural life in nature, sometimes only experienced in travel. The potential for rural life to be very brutal, suggested by Carmel’s visit to her lover’s family farm is driven home by the one chapter that focused on Patrick. It was brutal and violent. There is also familial violence between Carmel and her sister, Carmel and her daughter, and Patrick and the women in his life.

Nature is so present in the book, it’s like another character. The idea that all our names for things in nature miss the point, that the creature is itself and doesn’t need our name. Our observation of a bird does not change its birdly essence. Mostly she examined the central dilemmas of being human, love, sex, and family. It could be harrowing, but love endured.

Throughout the book there is poetry which we are to take as Patrick McDaragh’s poetry. They are very much focused on the land, the flowers, the birds, and the animals and, of course, on love. He wrote a poem for the important women in his life, though oddly, not for his American wife. Reading an essay Enright wrote for The Guardian, it seems some of McDaragh’s character was based on the Irish poet Patrick Kavanaugh. Of him and his relationship to women, she concluded their was “a faint creepiness.” Of Patrick McDaragh, there is always a faint creepiness, too.

Another theme running through the book was the sharp contrast between ugliness and beauty. She had no beautiful words for sex or its messy aftermath. It was often painful, disappointing, and demeaning. But the flowers, trees, the water of streams and oceans, and the birds were described with loving awe. The birds, there were always birds, another constant refrain throughout a book named for the wren.

The Wren, The Wren at W. W. Norton
Anne Enright at GoodReads (She posts essays and book recommendations.)

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2024/01/06/the-wren-the-wren-by-anne... show less

The Green Road, Anne Enright, author; Lloyd James, Alana Kerr, Gerard Doyle, narrators
I felt that this book was beautifully written and read. It takes place in Ireland, and the narrators mastered the brogue perfectly, using warm and expressive tones, bringing each character to life. The author captured their speaking style and dialogue so well, that the various expressions used will sometimes make the reader’s lips curl upwards in a smile or downward in a frown, as they are drawn right show more into the narrative. It is an in depth study of a family, over a little more than a quarter of a century, as each member faces the life and death issues all families will face over the years. How they deal with each other, the issues, and also themselves is thoroughly explored. The family alternately deteriorates and reconstitutes itself, rising and falling with life’s events. Here is sibling rivalry, in the flesh, parent-child favoritism, conflicts with sexuality, religion, and bias, writ large upon the page. The reader will get to know each character well, and will like some and completely dislike others. Some are needier, some are martyrs, some are downright annoying, but all are real, all have parts of themselves each reader will be able to identify with, and/or empathize with, as they experience life’s trials. The processes of maturing and of aging are given equal stress. Each phase of life has its moments. The act of discovering oneself often occurs in the oddest places and times. Who are we really, and how will we act in a time of crisis? In this book, we will discover how some run from trouble and some race toward it.
The beautiful green road lies just beyond the family homestead and it will lure the family members to it as the years go by, sometimes bringing joy and sometimes anxiety. What it represents will be up to each reader to decide. For me, I think it was the changing lifestyles and world around them, regardless of whether or not the change was desired. As with all things in life, their homestead represented a place of solace for some and distress for others. Life did not stand still for any of them, and none could have anticipated what lie in wait at the end of their road or when their road would end.
In the first part of the book, called “Leaving”, each of the characters, Dan, Constance, Emmet, Hannah and their mother Rosaleen, have their own chapter to relate their individual, personal side of this story, beginning in 1980. At this time, both parents are alive, Hannah is 12, Emmet is 16, Dan is away at school and Constance is independent, working in Dublin. The gift of this author was to make each telling different so that the story did not have the feeling of repetition, but rather the feeling of revelation.
The second part of the book begins in 2005, after decades have passed, and each of the siblings is in their late thirties and early 40’s; Rosaleen, is in her late 70’s. They return home from different parts of the world, for Xmas dinner, to be with their widowed mother who has informed them that she will be selling the house and moving in with her daughter. Sparks begin to fly. It had been years since they all gathered together, yet they all still harbored bitter resentments about one thing or another. They had hidden pasts, hidden relationships, secrets they did not wish to share, and often, all of these repressed feelings surged forth and caused a tremendous explosion of emotion.
When Rosaleen continued to try and exert control, as if they were children, telling each what they had to or should do, subtly picking at their hidden faults to weaken them, trying to manipulate the situation which was her special talent, she suddenly found herself abandoned, utterly alone and without support; at least that is how Rosaleen perceived it. As with all families, each member perceives wrongdoing from their own perspective. It was from this moment, though, that The Green Road takes them all to a point of awareness and acceptance of their lives, with all of its implications, to a point of maturity that had not heretofore been seen. Rosaleen draws the conclusion that she has paid too little attention to her children, a fact I think they would surely dispute, because it wasn’t really about attention, it was more about the kind of attention she gave to each family member that caused friction for years and guilt and resentment for some. As their reactions are studied and exposed, the reader will discover that Rosaleen was prone to complaining and was not very easily satisfied; Dan, was often kind and compassionate, but was unsure of his sexuality and his religious beliefs; Hannah, always wore her insecurities with a mask of anger and escaped them with drink; Emmet’s emotions were in conflict as he traveled all over the world helping others, although he also harbored cruel thoughts, as he searched for a way to help himself and to discover the reason he had difficulty loving another; and Constance tried to satisfy the needs of everyone else, often at the expense of herself, in order to satisfy some need of her own. The fears and prejudices of each of the characters, the relationships between each sibling and others in the outside world, the parent and child conflicts and expectations, the lifestyle views of the young and old, ill and healthy, are all thrust into the readers’ minds with poignant descriptions that will touch not only their minds, but also their hearts.
There is a brief discussion about the years of the Aids epidemic which touched me deeply. I remember those years with such pain because of the number of victims that were lost and the loneliness they experienced as they were shunned by an overly fearful society. Anyone who knew anyone who had the disease will relive the experience as the author writes it out. I can still see the wraithlike forms of the victims as they marched alone, down hospital corridors, sat alone in hospital cafeterias, died alone with few people around them who were unafraid to touch them. Perhaps the best quality of this book is how it transformed hopelessness into hope, in so many of the lives of the characters, and how it showed that hope does spring eternal even in the face of utter disaster! show less