It took me a while to get into this book, which I bought at the last Arts & Letters Live event at the Dallas Museum of Art before the coronavirus panic cancelled everything. The event was on a Tuesday. Two days earlier, Louise Erdrich had spent most of her time at the Arts & Letters Live event reading from her book (we are talking about forty-five minutes here, reader), and so many attendees had complained that a kind soul at the DMA had told Anne Enright: "don't just read from your book, talk about art and creativity." Which isn't necessarily what we wanted - we wanted to hear about process, about the magic behind the scenes, but was still better than sitting through forty-five minutes of someone reading her book at us. Anne Enright did seem to try as hard as she could to talk about art and creativity, but she was also clear that this topic puzzled her a little, because for her writing was work, and what you had to do, mostly, was show up and pull the words out of you. (I paraphrase.) Yet she tried her hardest to give us what we had come for. I liked her so much I even looked more interviews of her on the Internet and came across this one.
It was a good talk, and Enright's Irish accent left no doubt she was not from the States, even before she mentioned Dublin. I bring it up because the novel doesn't follow the American tropes of what makes a good novel, and some American readers will be left annoyed, although they shouldn't. The focus in the U.S. is so much on plot that a novel like Actress is bound to bother some. The voice is spellbinding - the narrator's voice in the first-person point of view grabs you and never lets go - but the plot remains threadbare for a while. We're supposed to turn the page because the narrator's mother - the actress in the title - shot someone in the foot. That doesn't seem important enough to keep the reader entranced, and it really isn't. But the novel really isn't about that. It is about the relationship of the actress mother and the narrator daughter, interspersed with comments on the narrator's marriage to her husband, addressed as 'you' in the text, which jolted me and I want to say jarred me but it was just perfect for this book and this narrator.
Enright's powers of observation are amazing in this book. I never knew what it was like to be in a character's head until I read Actress, and I expect my writing to benefit greatly as a result. I loved what the narrator paid attention to, and how she phrased things - although she didn't have any particularly novel turns of phrase, she came across as very real in how she interpreted some of the things that her mother did and some other things that happened to her mother. Of the narrator's tastes we know very little, so it is hard to say whether I like her or not. The most we learn about her is through her love affairs, in particular the one with the man who will become her husband. And Enright is so spot on about that part that I just wouldn't put the book down until I had finished it after I reached that point.
I teared up toward the end. I'm 42 and I'm not afraid to admit it (both the crying and my age). Those were the pages about the daughter-mother relationship after (I'm trying not to spoil the novel here) an older man the mother knows has sex with the daughter in a not completely consensual manner. (Read the novel.) And that's the point in the novel, of all places, where her mother felt more alive on the page than mine in real life, but hers was a talented actress who had a body in addition to a brain and mine was a spoilt child who was crass and vulgar and talentless and not particularly intelligent and terribly resentful of any women who professed to enjoy sex. And I thought about my ideal mother in the world of realistic mothers (ideal but realistically enough) and I thought about a world where members of families get to exist on their own terms, as their own person, and not because the parents want to make themselves feel good at the expense of the children and I thought about more things and mostly I thought about why I had wanted to escape to France so badly and why once I had made it to the United States I had not wanted to come back.
The relationship between mother and daughter in Enright's novel is rich with nuances and vivid with colors and the only criticism I would utter, just to show I can still have a critical mind in front of this masterpiece, is that the daughter doesn't seem to change much throughout the book, although she does grow up (because the novel mostly shows up in her teens and her young adulthood). While I was reading I kept thinking: American writers would not write a novel like that, it has no plot, and there is doubt that Enright as Irish woman was able to get away with more than an American lady in her position. (I also loved all of her observations about the world around her. This seems a time as good as any to mention it.) So, to my American readers: stick with it. This is a book that stays with it and rises high above the fray when so many American novels attempt to follow a foolproof recipe for success. It is the sort of book you write when you are confident enough in your craft that you are not worried about the author's reaction.
Other Irish writers have experimented with strong voices of first-person narrators recently - I am thinking in particular of Milkman by Anna Burns, Burns being North Irish as well as the recent recipient of the Booker Prize for this book. It is also written in first-person point-of-view with little to no dialogue and just a lot of interior narration. A greater sense of danger pervades Milkman, and to be frank I paused reading it yet but will get back to it soon. But it is interesting - although not surprising - that European novelists take more risks with their fiction. In the United States the publishing model means that authors try to hit the blockbuster formula - a book no one will object to, no one will feel transformed by, just a solid yet predictable story where the hero goes through a lot of hardships (especially some that lend themselves well to special effects) and wins in the end, whether it is the girl, the prize, both, or more. I don't read novels as much as I should, finding American novels quite disappointing most of the time, but Enright's is worth keeping.
I'll finish by mentioning that Enright reads her own novel in the audiobook, and if the few pages she read at the Dallas Museum of Art are any indication, you will really get the most of the reading experience if you buy the audiobook and listen to Enright create this world anew for you.
One of the best books of 2020, no doubt.
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