Book of the week:
Pawed, used, loved and lonely
Anne Enright's new stories take Hermione Lee to sad, stifling places - but make her laugh too
Saturday March 1, 2008 The Guardian
TAKING PICTURES by Anne Enright 240pp, Jonathan Cape, £12.99
"The thing I like about you," says one of Anne Enright's angry, muddled men, "is that you tell it like it is. 'You get old, you get fat, it all turns to shit, you die.'" The woman replies, in a shrugging tone quite typical of Enright's women: "Yeah well." And, yeah well, these stories do tell it like it is. They take unflinching, alarming pictures of the way things are in many women's lives. You don't go to Enright for gentle romance or reassurance, or for a nostalgic version of the Ireland her characters are always pulling away from and coming back to. As in The Gathering, her powerful Man Booker prizewinner, "every choice is fatal". "The promise of damage" at once allures and appals.
In Taking Pictures, an anorexic little sister who "enjoyed her death ... punctures"
the lives of her whole family. A beautiful psychotic detaches an old friend
from her comfortable dead marriage. A woman falls into a weekend of bad sex
- "an aimless battering around the nub of him" - with a damaged,
drinking liar. A pregnant unloved wife is full of fear and anxiety:
"Who is going to pay for it? Or love it?" An unfaithful husband's
girlfriend is killed in a car crash, and the death crashes into the already
compromised marriage. Women who at some level are friends try to kill each
other, or sabotage each other's lives. A couple with a new baby fight their
way through an appalling, resentful family weekend. A wife attunes herself
to her husband's memories of torture and imprisonment. A woman who survived
a brutal marriage is never visited by her son. Parents, in story after
story, are ill, must be cared for, die, are buried, are lost for ever -
their endings told with a breathtaking mixture of dryness and depth:
"They were all outraged by the end - not that there was anyone to blame
- it was just so outrageous: watching the tide of their father's death wash
over him and recede, wave after wave of it, until, by the end, they didn't
know if they wanted him to stay, or go."
Full review.
the lives of her whole family. A beautiful psychotic detaches an old friend
from her comfortable dead marriage. A woman falls into a weekend of bad sex
- "an aimless battering around the nub of him" - with a damaged,
drinking liar. A pregnant unloved wife is full of fear and anxiety:
"Who is going to pay for it? Or love it?" An unfaithful husband's
girlfriend is killed in a car crash, and the death crashes into the already
compromised marriage. Women who at some level are friends try to kill each
other, or sabotage each other's lives. A couple with a new baby fight their
way through an appalling, resentful family weekend. A wife attunes herself
to her husband's memories of torture and imprisonment. A woman who survived
a brutal marriage is never visited by her son. Parents, in story after
story, are ill, must be cared for, die, are buried, are lost for ever -
their endings told with a breathtaking mixture of dryness and depth:
"They were all outraged by the end - not that there was anyone to blame
- it was just so outrageous: watching the tide of their father's death wash
over him and recede, wave after wave of it, until, by the end, they didn't
know if they wanted him to stay, or go."
Full review.
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