Actress by Anne Enright review – boundless emotional intelligence
Anne Enright’s new novel opens with a question: “People ask me, ‘What was she like?’ and I try to figure out if they mean as a normal person: what was she like in her slippers, eating toast and marmalade, or what was she like as a mother, or what she was like as an actress – we did not use the word star.”
The actress is Katherine O’Dell and her daughter, Norah, tells her mother’s story, intertwined with her own. There is another question: why did Katherine go mad? The people who ask, Enright imagines, are fearful: “as though their own mother might turn overnight, like a bottle of milk left out of the fridge”. She reminds us that remembering a mother has its limitations – there will always be a vanishing point beyond which the rest is guesswork. And O’Dell’s story may be further complicated by the possibility that she was at her most real on stage.
What lies ahead is the best novel involving theatre since Angela Carter’s Wise Children, although this is a more ambiguous love letter to the theatre than Carter’s ebullient book. Enright was born in Dublin and her roots are partly theatrical (she even worked, for six months, as a professional actor). The Gathering, the masterly novel that won the Booker in 2007, had a comfortless power – could, at a stretch, be seen as a salute to Beckett. Actress is by no means light reading, but its desolations are offset by diverting writing, garnished with hope. Motherhood is a subject Enright has written about before, exploring its joy and tyranny in her nonfictional Making Babies (2004). But it is through fiction that life’s limitations are lifted and the buoyant idiosyncrasy of her style is allowed to flourish most freely. The wonderfully offbeat detail about the mother going off like milk left out of the fridge is typical (an extra prop in the opening paragraph’s imagined breakfast).
Norah recalls her mother’s house in Dublin, furnished from discarded stage sets: “you were always sitting in character, you were just not sure which one.” She frequently returns to the subject of Irishness, not least because her mother capitalised on her Irishness but was actually born in London. At one point, Norah notes: “Dubliners talk to each other very easily. We talk as though getting back to it, after some interruption.”
Perhaps this explains something about Enright’s prose: its trusting fluency, momentum, lack of aloofness. But having the gift of the gab can also be a cover: there are subjects about which Katherine will never speak. Norah has no idea who her father was. Nor can she resolve another mystery: her mother’s shooting of a film-maker, Boyd O’Neill, in the foot. O’Dell’s personal life is stranger than theatre: it is ironic that she should star in what would make a lousy scene in a movie and that the man she shot develops screenplays, a job about which he is gung-ho: “on some level, you were just throwing spaghetti against the wall, to see which strand would stick”.”
Related: Anne Enright: 'I've never been good with authority'
The many strands in this novel all stick. What’s more, you have to keep reminding yourself that each one is fictional. In a particularly realistic scene, a journalist, Holly Devane, interviews Norah after her mother’s death. Katherine died at 58 and Norah is now her mother’s age. Norah notes the young interviewer’s “flourishing intelligence that ran so close to stupidity”. Devane has concocted an intrusive theory about Katherine’s sexuality. Little does she know what either mother or daughter has suffered – sexual trauma about which we will eventually learn, but which is not about to find its way into any magazine article.
This novel achieves what no real actor’s memoir could. There is an understanding about not understanding what makes a great actor (although Norah touches on the stillness at the heart of some great performances). The daughter writes as a sage non-star but, before long, youth emerges as the great upstager. The passages that describe Norah’s life seem blessedly free compared with those about her mother. Enright triumphs as a chameleon: memoirist, journalist, critic, daughter – her emotional intelligence knows no bounds. This is a study of possession that includes the subtly implied pain of having to share your mother with a crowd and of being obliged to admire her from afar. If, towards the end, the novel runs away with itself (the scene in which a hare is buried at an Irish television centre lost me), it is always at the service of life’s jumbled truths. A sea view in Bray, outside Dublin, proves to be as good a pausing place as any and Enright is to be congratulated on not seeking to tidy up life for show, in allowing loose ends to be themselves.
• Actress by Anne Enright is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
