Anne Enright’s first novels were whimsical, mannered, driven by plot devices that might have come from the discarded first drafts of the magic realists. They were redeemed by her style – always precise and deft and lyrical. A brief foray into non-fiction, 2004’s Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, seemed to mark a turning point for Enright, and the Man Booker Prize-winning The Gathering (2007) moved away from the Angela Carter-inspired early work to give a stunning present-day portrait of a family in mourning. The Forgotten Waltz (2011), about the fallout from an affair, cemented her reputation as the leading chronicler of contemporary Irish life (without quite reaching the heights of its predecessor). Now we have The Green Road, which is very much of a part with her previous two novels, dealing with the shabby materialism of the Celtic tiger generation, with the Irish diaspora, with family.
Enright often feels as if she’s playing with our expectations of what an Irish novel should do – the boxes that must be ticked in order to satisfy some Anglo-American dream of Ireland. She writes about the stereotypical Irish family in a fine passage in The Gathering: “There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered with, as a child. There is always a colossal success, with several houses in various countries to which no one is ever invited. There is a mysterious sister. These are just trends, of course, and, like trends, they shift. Because our families contain everything and, late at night, everything makes sense. We pity our mothers, what they had to put up with in bed or in the kitchen, and we hate them or we worship them, but we always cry for them.”
Related: Anne Enright: 'Love is a great punishment for desire'
Emmet's story in Mali is as intricate, sparse and dark as anything in JM Coetzee
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