The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright: review in The Telegraph

Anne Enright’s darkly funny tale of adultery in modern Dublin trumps her 2007 Man Booker Prize winner, argues Edmund Gordon

Anne Enright’s fifth novel, The Forgotten Waltz, is a simple tale of adultery and its consequences, told from a female perspective. This places it in an honourable if well-worn tradition. Adultery was a key subject for the 19th-century novel: such tragic heroines as Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina were defined almost entirely by their rebellions against the bonds of marriage.

In recent decades, however, with the softening of attitudes towards divorce, the subject has lost much of its usefulness for writers. The few modern novels that have successfully explored it (Brian Moore’s The Doctor’s Wife and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane come to mind) have been set in conservative religious communities, with old-fashioned strictures and sentimentalities (Roman Catholic Belfast in the Seventies and a Bangladeshi enclave of contemporary London respectively). The Forgotten Waltz – which is set in the basically secular environment of 21st-century Dublin – is a brave and unusual variation on a familiar theme.

The novel is narrated by Gina Moynihan, a Dubliner in her mid-thirties who works in IT. She is looking back from the winter of 2009 over the seven years since she first met Seán Vallely, the man for whom she has left her husband. Gina presents us with an anatomy of their affair, from their first glimpse of one another at a barbecue, through a series of assignations in anonymous hotels, to her uncomfortable relationship with Seán’s 11-year-old daughter after he has left his wife.

Enright’s interest is not, however, in the broad shape of the affair so much as in its texture, its moment-by-moment shifts of feeling and perception. She achieves her most brilliant effects at the level of the sentence (rather than, say, the paragraph or the chapter); her novels are mosaics of small but captivating details. Her physical descriptions, in particular, are compressed masterpieces of glancing insight and spiky wit, as in the characterisation (from her second novel) of a drunk “whose face was working in slow motion, as though every emotion was a puzzle to him, and its solution a surprise”.

The new novel, an advance on her earlier work in many respects, contains a refinement of this line, with its description of a woman “with the confused look that Botox gives you, like you might be having an emotion but you couldn’t remember which one”.

Hers is a style that glories in minutiae. She modulates so finely between comedy and pathos, between psychology and physicality, that she conveys a sense of the richness of lived experience, compared to which most other novelists appear to work in broad strokes. There are sentences in her work, whole passages even, that you want to mark up and learn off by heart for their warmth and humour, their sense of truth.

Read the complete review at The Telegraph.