Writer happy with typing and wiping - story from Sydney Morning Herald

ANNE ENRIGHT is bubbling, alert, resilient, surfing the wave of parties and interviews, the interminable fuss.
And still she is laughing, despite our early-morning rendezvous. She's a night owl, not a lark, but, as she says, her life has "has been suddenly turned upside down" by the unexpected intervention of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

The bookies were offering 20-1 against The Gathering, her third novel, an exploration of Irish life. "I didn't bet because I didn't want to jinx it," she says, lounging back on the chair by her desk, feet propped on the radiator, relaxing, if temporarily (four suitcases stacked in the hall of her house in Bray, just south of Dublin, announce her imminent flight to Canada). She hasn't had time to do her hair. "I haven't combed my hair in 20 years," she jokes. "I always put on a bit of moisturiser. I'm always ready to go."

A friend of hers read the book some months before it was published. "He told me 'You're going to win the Booker.' He's been saying that all year."
It's that kind of novel. You love it or loathe it. It doesn't take prisoners, doesn't simper or seek to be liked. Abrasively honest and toweringly moving, it grabs and shakes you, rabbiting on in a manic monologue, comic, tragic, lost and profound. It tells the story of the Hegarty clan, a bunch of messed-about Irish, packed with bombast, regret and love lost.

The first two chapters comprise one of fiction's best staged openings: daring, concise and compulsively searing: Veronica Hegarty, its narrator, visits her mother with news that Liam, the errant son, has drowned off Brighton, stones in his pockets. Mother wilts, bemusedly living in the midden of family memories, all those secrets, the whispers of ghosts amid the clutter and neglect. And then, when Veronica breaks the news, the mother hits her. The wages of frankness, the shock of truth.

Shock and truth have been Enright's hallmark since her arrival with a prize-winning batch of stories, The Portable Virgin, 16 years ago. Sex and violence, hate and desire, love and loneliness, the mash of visceral suffering laid on the lives of successive heroines. She laughs. It's the kind of stereotype of her work that's been cut and pasted by sundry journalists who haven't bothered to read her, to find the glint of wit and wry wisdom in her often transcendent prose. This knee-jerk take has dogged reactions to her win. "Depressive Irish saga wins the Booker Prize" (London's Daily Telegraph) is typical.

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Pic of author taken by Bookman Beattie at press conference following Man Booker Prize announcement last week.