Enright, Anne 1962–

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Enright, Anne 1962–

PERSONAL:

Born in 1962, in Dublin, Ireland. Ethnicity: "Irish." Education: Attended Trinity College, Dublin, and University of East Anglia.

CAREER:

Short-story and novel writer. Actress, television producer/director.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Candidate for Irish Times/Aer Lingus Irish Literature Prize, 1991; Rooney Prize, 1991; Man Booker Prize for Fiction, 2007, for The Gathering.

WRITINGS:

The Portable Virgin (short stories), Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1991.

The Wig My Father Wore (novel), Jonathan Cape (London, England), 1995.

(Contributor) Dermot Bolger, editor, Finbar's Hotel (short stories), Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1999.

What Are You Like? (novel), Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 2000.

The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (novel), Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (nonfiction), Jonathan Cape (London, England), 2004.

The Gathering (novel), Grove Press (New York, NY), 2007.

Taking Pictures, Jonathan Cape (London, England), 2008.

Yesterday's Weather, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2008.

SIDELIGHTS:

In 1991, Irish writer Anne Enright produced her first book, The Portable Virgin, a collection of short stories, mostly about idiosyncratic characters. In "Luck for a Lady," for example, Mrs. Hanratty is obsessed with numbering everything and becomes disturbed if her life is not well ordered. So does Cathy in "(She Owns) Everything," who sells handbags and always keeps her own in order. When she falls in love, her controlled life falls apart. A reviewer in the Observer asserted that Enright "writes with a kind of controlled battiness."

Enright's novel The Wig My Father Wore, published in 1995, also uses dreamlike and disjointed imagery to explore several kinds of love. The main character, Grace, is a television producer in London who is visited by an angel, with whom she falls in love. Her father is in a nursing home following two strokes. The program for which Grace works, LoveQuiz, represents the worst kind of superficial love, exploited by the media. Her "angel" lover, Stephen, represents an ideal love that cannot be totally grasped by mere humans.

According to John Tague in the Times Literary Supplement, the novel is "an intellectually inventive fable, polished with a comic light touch." Although Tague felt that the book is "an overgrown short story" and that the narrative is "a little pedestrian," a saving grace of TheWig My Father Wore, he wrote, is the humor with which Enright approaches her bizarre subject: "[Enright] is always ready to deflate any suggestion of ethereal artiness with an earthy one-liner." Although Tague acknowledged Enright's debt to author Angela Carter, he noted that "Enright's comic voice is all her own."

In 1999 Enright contributed to a composite novel, Finbar's Hotel, made up of several short stories by famous Irish authors. The stories, none identified by author, are held together by the story line of a husband who decides to spend one night alone, in a hotel, before he dies. Each vignette in the book takes place in the hotel, soon slated for demolition. Katharine Weber in the New York Times Book Review noted that this technique leads to "occasional jolts" in the narrative when one chapter leads into another, but that this drawback is "more than offset by the sustained excellence of the writing."

The protagonist of the story begins by looking for the hotel's minibar, which he can never seem to find. Along the way he encounters characters in other rooms, among them a cancer patient who has a brief affair while ignoring her treatments, an electrician who plays loud music to cover up the cries of his girlfriend's stolen cat, the heir of the former estate that is now a hotel, and an art thief. According to Weber, the credit for successfully tying these stories together belongs to Dermot Bolger, the editor and one of the contributors. Though Weber wrote that "no one … would presume to call [the book] an important work of literature," she said that it is "at times moving as well as suspenseful."

Drawing on personal experience, Enright challenges established thinking about motherhood in her nonfiction book Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood. Writing in the Observer, Vanessa Thorpe commented that "Enright's autobiographical book about the shocks and rewards of motherhood accepts as a basic premise that getting pregnant and going through labour is a scary, odd thing." Thorpe appreciated Enright's honesty about the pain and fear of experiencing labor, and about the many frustrations of coping with a newborn. Enright "skilfully anatomises the experiences of parenthood," observed London Times writer Caroline Gascoigne. "She expresses beautifully both the sense of connectedness to the world that motherhood has brought her and its rages." Despite the book's frankness about mixed or even negative emotions, Gascoigne found it essentially positive. "A seam of contentment, with not the slightest smugness about it, glitters through this book," she stated. "Never saccharine or sentimental, it is human, fallible, and aware of life's blessings."

The novel What Are You Like? deals with the family drama that ensues when a comatose woman, dying of brain cancer, delivers twins in Dublin in 1965. Separated at birth, neither Maria nor Rose suspects the other's existence until, at age twenty, Maria moves to New York City and meets a man who has a photograph of a girl who looks much like Maria. The sisters eventually begin searching for one another, leading them finally to discover the truth about their birth. While admiring many elements in the book, including its "compelling" story and Enright's ability to write sensitively about disparate characters, a reviewer for Publishers Weekly observed that Enright "struggles to keep the assorted pieces of her novel together."

In The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch Enright tells the story of an Irish prostitute who becomes the mistress of Paraguayan dictator Francisco Lopez in the 1850s. Jennifer Baker, writing in Library Journal, described its surrealistic elements and "overripe" imagery as drawbacks that combined to make the book a "nightmarish mix of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and William Faulkner's works." Guardian contributor Julie Myerson, on the other hand, admired the book, observing that "this isn't really a novel about Eliza at all, it's a novel about writing. It's a novel about the most dazzling sort of writing—a collection of pages that will best display Enright's white-knuckle grip on language, her excitable narrative energy, her eye for crunch and colour."

Enright's fourth novel, The Gathering, received glowing reviews and won the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2007. The story centers of Veronica Hegarty, a middle-aged woman who returns to her family home for the funeral of her runaway alcoholic brother Liam, who had committed suicide. As siblings in a large family, Veronica and Liam had been especially close, and as Veronica mourns his loss she tries to make sense of his self-destruction. Her reveries bring up confused and troubling memories about abuse that may or may not have occurred at the home of their grandmother. "This a story of family dysfunction," observed Adam Mars-Jones in an Observer review, "made distinctive by an exhilarating bleakness of tone. There is no sentimentality here, and no quirkiness…. The humor in it is very close to pain." Also noting this tone, Washington Post Book Review contributor Peter Behrens described The Gathering as a book informed by "a species of rage that aches to confront silence and speak truth at last." The novel, for Behrens, can be thought of as "the Dubliners of the new millennium, a book in which Enright aims to add a chapter to the moral history of her country."

Less enthusiastic, however, was the assessment of London Telegraph reviewer Elena Seymenliyska, who considered The Gathering "unremittingly gruelling" and based on over-worn Irish stereotypes. "It's not so much the story that's the problem," commented the critic, "as its concentrated Irishness, a state of being that surely doesn't need more examination." A writer for Kirkus Reviews, on the other hand, admired much in the book, calling it "A dreamy, melancholy swirl of a story, wise about the bonds and burdens linking children to each other and their grown selves." Hailing the novel's emotional truthfulness and the "transformative power of Enright's language," New York Times Book Review contributor Liesl Schillinger deemed The Gathering a courageous engagement "with the carnival horrors of everyday life."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, November, 2002, review of The Wig My Father Wore, p. 25.

Booklist, August 1, 2000, Danise Hoover, review of What Are You Like?, p. 2109; January 1, 2003, Danise Hoover, review of The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, p. 844; August 1, 2007, Joanne Wilkinson, review of The Gathering, p. 35.

Bookmarks, January-February, 2008, review of The Gathering, p. 34.

Books, spring, 2000, review of What Are You Like?, p. 21.

Books in Canada, September, 2003, review of The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, p. 4.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, October 16, 2007, "Irish Writer Wins Man Booker Prize for The Gathering."

Entertainment Weekly, September 14, 2007, Allyssa Lee, review of The Gathering, p. 153.

Globe & Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), December 9, 2000, review of What Are You Like?, p. D24; November 22, 2003, review of The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, p. D5; April 26, 2003, review of The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch.

Guardian, September 21, 2002, Julie Myerson, review of The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch; April 28, 2007, A.L. Kennedy, review of The Gathering; March 1, 2008, Hermione Lee, review of The Gathering, p. 6.

Houston Chronicle, March 2, 2008, Bob Thompson, review of The Gathering, p. 18.

Independent (London, England), August 27, 2004, Jonathan Myerson, review of Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood; June 7, 2007, Patricia Craig, review of The Gathering.

Irish University Review: A Journal of Irish Studies, September 22, 2007, Hedwig Schwall, review of The Gathering.

Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2002, review of The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, p. 1788; July 1, 2007, review of The Gathering.

Library Journal, August 1, 2000, Caroline M. Hallsworth, review of What Are You Like?, p. 155; February 15, 2003, Jennifer Baker, review of The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, p. 168; August 1, 2007, Caroline M. Hallsworth, review of The Gathering, p. 66.

London Review of Books, October 17, 2002, review of The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, p. 19; October 18, 2007, Eleanor Birne, review of The Gathering, p. 30.

London Telegraph, May 17, 2007, Elena Seymenliyska, review of The Gathering.

London Times, August 8, 2004, Caroline Gascoigne, review of Making Babies.

Los Angeles Times, October 1, 2000, review of What Are You Like?, p. 11.

New Statesman, November 27, 2000, review of What Are You Like?, p. 46; October 7, 2002, review of The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, p. 55.

New York Review of Books, September 21, 2000, Gabriele Annan, review of What Are You Like?, p. 90.

New York Times Book Review, May 2, 1999, Katharine Weber, review of Finbar's Hotel, p. 19; September 30, 2007, Liesl Schillinger, review of The Gathering.

Observer, April 16, 2000, review of What Are You Like?, p. 13; September 22, 2002, review of The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, p. 17; November 2, 2003, review of The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, p. 18; August 1, 2004, Vanessa Thorpe, review of Making Babies; May 6, 2007, Adam Mars-Jones, review of The Gathering.

Publishers Weekly, July 17, 2000, review of What Are You Like?, p. 173; July 23, 2007, review of The Gathering, p. 44.

Swiss News, January 1, 2008, review of The Gathering, p. 52.

Times Literary Supplement, March 31, 1995, John Tague, review of The Wig My Father Wore, p. 22; September 26, 1997, C.L. Dallat, review of Finbar's Hotel, p. 23; March 3, 2000, Robert Macfar- lane, review of What Are You Like?, p. 21; September 6, 2002, Sam Thompson, review of The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, p. 23; December 6, 2002, review of The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, p. 9; November 5, 2004, Lucy Dallas, review of Making Babies, p. 36; May 11, 2007, Kristin Ewins, review of The Gathering, p. 20.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), June, 2, 2002, review of What Are You Like?, p. 6.

US Weekly, October 2, 2000, Melanie Rehak, review of What Are You Like?, p. 63.

Washington Post Book World, October 21, 2007, Peter Behrens, review of The Gathering, p. 4.

World of Hibernia, March 22, 2001, Eileen Battersby, review of What Are You Like?, p. 18.