Anne Enright’s striking new novel begins with an unlikely sidestep. Nell is ruminating on the work of a psychologist “who is interested in the different ways people think”. In 2009, Nell tells us, he fitted a young woman with a beeper that prompted her to jot down her random thoughts at any moment, creating a record of the disconnection between the events in the young woman’s life and her perception and imagination. As Nell reflects: “We don’t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.”
Enright’s literary career has demonstrated her skill in tracking these meetings – or the way in which these meetings fail to happen – particularly within families. The Gathering, which won the Booker Prize in 2007, examined the reverberations of a suicide, analysing layers of wounding with dark precision. The Green Road (2015) tracks the outward and inward journeys of the Madigan siblings as they spin out from each other and reconnect. In Actress (2020), Norah recollects the life of her mother, Katherine O’Dell – the actress in question – and interweaves it with her own. The Wren, The Wren might almost be considered a companion volume to that novel, for while it centres on a daughter, Nell, and her mother, Carmel, these two women’s lives are shaped by the legacy of Carmel’s father, a famous Irish poet called Phil McDaragh. We discover how his choices – his charisma, pain and carelessness – detonate through generations.
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