Congratulations on the Book Award, and Welcome to the Scrutiny

From The New York Times overnight.

The Man Booker Prize carries with it a check for £50,000 (about $105,000), a guaranteed increase in book sales and, for little-known authors, instant popular recognition. But the spotlight sometimes falls in unexpected places.

That is what happened to the Irish writer Anne Enright, who won the 2007 Booker for “The Gathering” last month. The novel, in which a woman tries to untie her family’s tangled past as she brings her brother’s body home to be buried in Ireland, has won glowing praise, as Ms. Enright’s books generally do. But almost immediately the praise was intermingled with criticism over a recent essay by Ms. Enright in The London Review of Books.

The essay was about Madeleine McCann, who was 3 years old when she disappeared this spring in Portugal. In the essay Ms. Enright tried to work through a cacophony of complicated emotions toward the girl’s parents, including reluctant voyeurism, distaste and pity. But newspapers here and in Britain picked out a sentence in which Ms. Enright said that she “disliked the McCanns earlier than most people” and ignored what she wrote afterward: that she was ashamed of the impulse and, in the end, rejected it.

“Her publishers should have put a large brown bag over her head immediately,” Janet Street-Porter wrote in The Independent on Sunday, in a typical comment. “I urge you not to buy Enright’s book until she apologizes for this slur.”

Ms. Enright did apologize for her essay “if it caused any hurt to the McCanns” and, in an interview back at home in this seaside suburb of Dublin a week or so later, described the article as “an emotional journey full of nuance and contradiction and self-appraisal” that had been misinterpreted. But while she did not want to be drawn into a longer discussion, what seemed clear was that the essay was of a piece with all of her writing: a subtle and not-easy-to-summarize examination of intricate emotions that sometimes contradict one another.
“The Gathering” is Ms. Enright’s fourth novel. (She has also published a book of essays and a book of short stories.) It features scenes from long ago that may or may not have happened, and questions — about motives, about family history, about what is real and what is imagined — that are never fully answered. The protagonist, Veronica Hegarty, has two children, a foundering marriage and a lot to resolve. Ideas come up, are examined, double back on themselves. Reading it is almost like being in a dream.

“Veronica’s reminiscences have an incantatory power that makes them not depressing but enthralling,” Liesl Schillinger wrote in The New York Times Book Review in September. In The Irish Times, Kate Holmquist wrote that “Enright is so aware of the darkness within herself that her writing brings readers into the subconscious gloom, giving her a reputation as a challenging writer whose bleak vision is bearable only due to the beauty of her language.”
The book may have a simple framework, but the feelings it deals with are complex and hard to parse. “She’s bumping against this large wall of pain to see which part hurts the most,” Ms. Enright said, speaking of Veronica.

Ms. Enright was sitting in her living room, still full of post-Booker detritus, including more aging bouquets of flowers than there were vases to put them in. A quick-talking woman, bubbling with ideas and a ready laugh, she was also exhausted. She had just come back from a literary festival in Canada and was leaving for Brussels the next day. “Once you’ve been Bookered,” she said, coining a phrase, “you realize you can’t say no.”

Ms. Enright set “The Gathering” in the 1990s at a time when sexual crimes — by priests and in families — were being publicly discussed in Ireland for the first time. Born into a chaotic, unhappy family, the adult Veronica struggles to make sense of what she realizes in retrospect was the sexual abuse of her brother by a creepy family acquaintance. “The first journey for Veronica is to know what went on, to identify it, and that’s only made possible by the cultural changes of the 1990s,” Ms. Enright said.

She said she deliberately left many things ambiguous, particularly as Veronica tries to trace the roots of the abuse back two generations. “It’s almost like Veronica’s imagination has been stained by the family she grew up in, and a stain is an ambiguous thing,” she explained.
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