‘The Death of Some Ideal’

One of the central characters of our time—as recognizable, perhaps, as a new woman, a superfluous man, a penniless governess, or a melancholy malcontent once were—is an educated, extremely online young woman, clinging precariously to the lowest rungs of the culture industry and the rental market. She may be opposed to capitalism in a theoretical way, and she may well sleep with both men and women without feeling a need to sail under the flag of any particular sexual identity. Sooner or later, however, her ideas about such matters as gender, class, or race will run up against her failings and desires. The site of conflict is typically a passionate relationship in which sexual tastes aren’t aligned and power isn’t evenly distributed, giving rise to soul-searching, sometimes comedy and sometimes rage.

Nell McDaragh, who narrates the opening section of Anne Enright’s novel The Wren, the Wren, seems at first to follow this pattern to the letter. Twenty-two, a recent college graduate, smart, and entering adult life in the mid-to-late 2010s, she has an urge to write but isn’t solemn or self-dramatizing about it. She dabbles in autofiction, making notes in “an apple green Moleskine I thought might look good on Insta,” and writes poems in longhand in the hope “that using real paper meant they were real poems.” To earn a living she churns out content for an agency: travel pieces about tropical islands she hasn’t visited, social media posts ghostwritten for “an actress/eco-influencer called Meg.” Nell isn’t snooty about the work.

Venturing out into the world as a writer turns out to involve “a lot of staying in.” Meg the influencer’s lavishly remodeled Victorian townhouse—she has an especially enviable kitchen, with chairs in six different colors—weighs on Nell’s mind when she contemplates the dingy shared house to which “late capitalism,” as she calls it, has consigned her. Her own few tasteful items of cookware “sit in my smelly, rented kitchen like bits of broken middle-class aspiration.” “We are the redundant generation,” she thinks. “We are fodder.” What’s more, “I will never have chairs in six different colours.”

Nell is not an ingenue. “I knew how to be, I want to remember that,” she writes, looking back from at least five years later on the crisis she’s recounting:

I knew how to enjoy sex, eat, get drunk and recover, touch myself, touch someone else. I knew how to dance, get a little out of it and have big deep stupid discussions; a sweet overnight session with a girl I liked, or something more demanding and chaotic with a guy, who was usually someone I did not like so much—a kind of antagonism there, truth be told. Sex with a guy always felt a bit like fighting, you could get hurt, or realise that you had been hurt when the hangover hit. Hard to say what you felt at the time. (Am I a masochist? Oh, I can’t remember.)

One guy, however, gets under her skin. This is Felim, a strapping young man from the country who’s demonstrating his party trick, lifting people up by the head, when she meets him in a nightclub: “When I landed again I was shrieky and coy. Like one of those girls—the shrieky, coy kind of girl.” Further encounters follow, then sex. In no time Nell believes herself to be in love with this owner of a half-dead social media account filled with commentary on his local football team.

There are warning signs. Felim rarely appreciates her jokes, takes days to respond to messages, and talks too insistently about his lack of a continuing attachment to his ex. One of his first moves is to send her a link to Betty Davis’s song “Nasty Gal.” It emerges that this is the role he has in mind for Nell. Before long their relationship has boiled down to him showing up drunk for rough sex modeled after online porn. (“He had trouble finishing and put his hand on my neck to get himself off.”) Sometimes, almost against her will, she finds these performances exciting. More often she finds them saddening and “a bit, maybe coercive?” All the same, she continues to hanker for Felim’s love and approval.

We are in the ambit of what’s been called “the millennial sex novel.” And we’re in it all the more firmly because, instead of doing these things in Crown Heights or Peckham or Neukölln, Nell is doing them in Dublin—the setting of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends (2017) and its successors. (The Wren, the Wren carries an endorsement from Rooney.) Enright is, however, not a millennial sex novelist but a writer whose characters have been dealing with men who are problematic, and worse, for more than thirty years, and she soon takes the story in an unexpected direction. Felim, out of the blue, takes Nell to a family christening, then to the family farm in Louth. His grandmother asks Nell if she is related to “the poet.” Nell affirms that she is.

You are very welcome here, she said. And I thought I would run screaming out of the house tearing my hair and ripping off my clothes. I would streak naked through the near field and the long field and the fucking far field and there I would live, crouched and mad in the ditch. I also felt as though I had come home.

Thank you, I said.

From here on out, in Enright’s hands, the millennial sex novel gets absorbed into something richer and stranger.

Anne Enright was born in Dublin in 1962 and worked as a television producer for six years before launching herself as a writer in the early 1990s. Recognized from early on as an uncommonly gifted stylist with a then-less-marketable interest in Irish womanhood, she made forays into magic realism and highly colored historical fiction—Angela Carter was briefly a mentor—before winning the Booker Prize for her fourth novel, The Gathering (2007). This inaugurated a run of books—The Forgotten Waltz (2011), The Green Road (2015), and Actress (2020)—put together with the dexterity and imaginative range of a novelist who has found an inexhaustible seam of material and a tone that can do almost anything with it. They’re concerned with the Irish family, with mothers and daughters, with changes in Irish society, and with the characters’ struggles to build honest, loving relationships as well as to uncover and describe the damage that makes that a struggle.

In the background of these novels are two developments in recent Irish history. One is the partial unraveling of the old concordats between the Irish state and the Catholic Church and, older still, between the Church and the nuclear family, under which women were offered spiritual authority in the marital home in exchange for their subordination elsewhere. The other is the economic boom that ran almost continuously from the mid-1990s until 2008, transforming Irish life, not to mention the Irish real estate market, and speeding up the first development. Although the Church lost its “special position,” as Ireland’s constitution used to put it, after a referendum in 1972, it wasn’t until the confident boom years that sexual abuse in schools and seminaries—and the same, plus exploitation and neglect, in institutions for troublesome women, the Magdalene Laundries—became the subject of a historical reckoning that’s still underway.

Enright isn’t afraid to be blunt, and she has written forcefully about the “dishonoured dead” of the laundries in a 2015 essay, “Antigone in Galway.” But she doesn’t like to be obvious, and even in The Gathering, which is set in 1998 and deals with the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse, she arranges the plot at a slight angle to public events. Veronica Hegarty’s investigation of her brother Liam’s suicide is a private, inward affair. Everyday complicity in abuse of the kind that blighted Liam’s life is figured as a huge open secret rather than something that needs to be dramatized directly. There’s an implication that the abuser’s hold over Liam’s family, which dates from the early years of the Irish Free State, wasn’t altogether unlike the clientelist political system that was then being built. (Ostensibly a helpful friend of a relative, the abuser turns out to have been her penny-pinching landlord.) But it’s only an implication, which makes it more powerful, not less, when Veronica begins to speak of “the anatomy and mechanism of a family—a whole fucking country—drowning in shame.”

At the same time the country is filling up with money. Enright’s narrators are as frank about this as they are about sex. There’s an emphasis on good food, home improvements, and rising asset prices. Veronica, who wrote about interior design for a living before having children with a man who works in corporate finance, composes her scalding monologue while surveying the calming surfaces—“oatmeal, cream, sandstone, slate”—with which she has decorated their five-bedroom house. She’s pained by the thought that her father died at a time when “no one in Ireland ate mango.” A marvelous sequence in The Green Road details a character’s heroically extravagant Christmas grocery shopping as she prepares for a tense family reunion in 2005. The lovers in The Forgotten Waltz are out-and-out yuppies, uneasily mesmerized by the Dublin real estate bubble and conscious of “a vague prissiness about pasta that was not home-made.”

There are, of course, ironic overtones to pondering off-white paint shades while stripping away historical evasions, just as there are to heaping a shopping cart high in a chapter that also alludes to the Great Famine, or to financial exuberance in general when the 2008 crash is waiting in the wings. But Enright’s sense of the way past and present interpenetrate is too subtle for straightforward irony to be the dominant note. There’s no suggestion that the characters are at fault for being pleased to live in a country that’s no longer—by the standards of Western Europe—poor, and there are hints of dream-logical connections between, say, real estate and the nation’s psychic health. In The Gathering, Veronica visits an old mental asylum and notices a mass grave—a sideways glance at the exhumations that finally brought the realities of the Magdalene Laundries into focus. In The Forgotten Waltz, set nearly a decade later, a similar asylum has become a hotel where bachelorette parties share the corridors with the ghosts of the past.

Enright’s women, too, make a virtue of getting on with things, of moving on. And she gives them a lot to move on from: fathers (emotionally opaque, sometimes violent, often absent or long dead), mothers (impractical, given to poor health and dramatic gestures, often from richer families than the fathers), siblings (the permutations usually include a drunk one, a sanctimonious one, and a mysterious one: “All big families are the same,” says Veronica, who sees herself as the sensible one). Inept, needy, or bullying men are another problem and a frequent occasion for witty pen portraiture. One “soured in middle age. He had suffered the death of some ideal, perhaps, or of his mother.” Another “requested sex as though asking for directions from a stranger on the road. A nice stranger. But even so.”

Displays of wit aren’t the only point. In the world Veronica grew up in “men fucked women—it did not happen the other way around,” and a cultural script underlining the importance of consent was still a long way from school curricula. The figure of the older man who manipulates a young woman into drunken sex she doesn’t want—sex that isn’t wholly about sex, she intuits—comes in for repeated inspection. In both The Green Road, in which one such episode is quickly sketched, and Actress, in which it’s developed in greater detail and carries more narrative weight, the man’s full unpleasantness becomes clear to the woman only when he’s packing her off in a taxi. Norah O’Dell, the narrator of Actress, offers an arch observation. In Ireland, she says, we’re taught that no doesn’t always mean no by the way we’re expected to respond to offers of tea. You say no three times “and it means nothing. There is always tea.”

It’s easy to imagine a novel in which this remark would be merely a symptom: evidence, maybe, that Norah’s experience was so traumatic she can’t address it without an inappropriate recourse to humor. That isn’t the way things work in Enright’s fiction, in which the main characters confront the typical elements of what Parul Sehgal has called “the trauma plot”—inherited patterns of damaging behavior, family secrets involving violence or sexual violation—without being guided, overtly or otherwise, by a pop-cultural theory of trauma. Imagining the exchanges they’d have with their therapists, if they had therapists, is as far as they go in that direction. If they don’t end up trapped inside the damage, it’s because Enright gives them a ferocious intelligence and independence of mind as well as no-nonsense feminist instincts, which isn’t to say that she doesn’t also depict moments that make women, in Norah’s words, “difficult to themselves.”

In Actress, Enright imagined the figure of the tricky, histrionic mother on a grander scale as Katherine O’Dell, a star of stage and screen and 1970s butter commercials who embodies, in a way that is and isn’t ironic, a certain idea of Ireland, at home and abroad. In The Wren, the Wren, she imagines the figure of the absent father as a comparable, if seedier, performer of Irishness.

Phil McDaragh, the man Felim’s grandmother calls “the poet,” is portrayed as a writer who became for a time quite famous for verse celebrating first love and the Irish countryside. (Enright needs him to be a nature poet for thematic reasons but gives enough detail to show that he isn’t a caricature of Seamus Heaney or anyone else.) Born and raised outside Tullamore, in the boggy heart of the country, Phil began to travel when his first marriage broke down in the 1970s, addressing himself to themes of migration and exile and to translating medieval Irish poems. Though viewed, it seems, as passé and a bit of a “culchie”—a laughable rural person—by knowing students in Dublin, he had enough of a reputation to find a place on the American university circuit, where his wistful, lilting charm and killer eyelashes went down well. After Phil’s sudden death in 1985, from undiagnosed esophageal cancer when he was in his fifties, Ireland’s president sent a uniformed representative to the funeral in his hated hometown.

Among the keepers of Phil’s flame are two daughters from his first marriage. Imelda, a rather wan academic, is proprietorially devoted to her father’s papers without having control over his estate, which passed to his unmentionable American second wife. Imelda’s younger sister, Carmel, the bossy, plain-speaking manager of a language school in Dublin, has a less settled relationship with her memories of Phil. She was his favorite daughter and the only one to whom he dedicated a poem, “The Wren, The Wren,” which likens the growing girl to a bird escaping into a scary but beautiful freedom. The poet’s sorrow over his “earthbound heart/of her love’s weight/relieved” seems less poignant, however, when Carmel considers that, back when she was twelve years old and her mother was succumbing to cancer, he abandoned them in order to pursue, among others, an Englishwoman named Bunty. Phil’s drinking and his violent temper have left a mark on both sisters, too.

Carmel is Nell’s mother, and her brisk common sense is to some extent what Nell is seeking to escape by holing up in a house in North Dublin belonging to “someone’s dead granny.” But one of the pleasures this novel offers is that it takes a while to explain all this. Like Sigrid Nunez in The Friend (2018), Enright uses the confiding voice of a narrator who’s musing in a notebook, apparently at random, to set up hidden themes and narrative elements. It’s only after more than fifty pages of Nell’s arresting jottings about her love life and many other matters that the perspective opens up in a splendid coup de théâtre. The novel begins to alternate between chapters written in the third person from Carmel’s point of view and chapters written in the first person by Nell. We’re given a single chapter by Phil, a piece of childhood reminiscence, and a dozen or so of his poems and translations.

Fictional poems are hard to judge. These ones pass the only test that matters: they don’t damage the credibility of Phil’s career. It wouldn’t have taken more than a few lines of sardonic pastiche to set up Nell’s realization that there’s something “fully creepy” about the poet’s bucolic sexual euphemisms (“twining,” “virgin ploughing”) and seductive lyrical procedures. Enright gives him a body of work with more to it than that, to the novel’s benefit.

The relationship between Nell and Carmel is filled with exasperation and misunderstandings, but also affection. Putting it at the center of the novel lets Enright do several things. It gives the figure of the millennial sex novel heroine—slightly flat, by design, in Conversations with Friends—a deep, richly imagined backstory of which she’s only partly aware. It lets Enright stage scenes of intergenerational puzzlement, some funny (Carmel often struggles to conceal unspoken doubts about whether late capitalism can be “defeated by hashtags and eating kimchi”), some complex and resonant (Nell thinks it’s just an objection to tattoos that makes Carmel’s polite approval transparently insincere when Nell shows her some words of Phil’s she’s had inked on her chest). And it displaces male power from the focal point of the story, making Felim an ugly blur in the foreground and Phil a shadowy, mythic presence in the background.

Phil’s mythic quality is important, however, and not just for his role as a father who needs cutting down to size, easy to hate but hard to dislike and “devastatingly easy to love.” We’re shown how Carmel’s childhood has shaped her life and personality, poisoning her relationship with her sister, making her suspicious of anything that smacks of “too much imagination,” and making it hard for her to accept love from anyone—other than Nell—who shows signs of dependence on her. Above all, an ambient reserve of violence gathers around her when she’s angry, and Enright uses some of her most casually masterful writing to depict the state of Carmel’s consciousness in two scenes in which she snaps and lashes out, the first time at Imelda, the second time at Nell. In some sense, then, the book draws a line from the poverty and violence of Phil’s childhood to his granddaughter putting up with an increasingly abusive boyfriend.

The mythic quality is what saves this from being schematic. It shifts the echoes and parallels between the characters’ lives into the realm of poetry rather than trauma. Carmel’s primal scene of abandonment, for example, is a memory of her father exposing her sick mother’s nakedness by whipping the coverings off her bed. Felim, armed with a phone camera, tries to do the same to Nell, and the image of a billowing sheet as an instrument of violence recurs in Phil’s description of country blood sports. Phil’s wish that his daughter will one day visit the Uffizi Gallery trickles down the generations, with results he wouldn’t like: Carmel sees only “ancient busts of important middle-aged men, who looked just like modern middle-aged men,” while Nell, visiting years later, is amused by the abundance of anatomically incorrect penises. Nature makes Nell think of freedom and an absolute otherness, but a related thread of imagery suggests that a primordial rural world, associated with cruelty to animals and a sour misogyny, is always ready to bubble up as well.

Enright has further revelations about Phil’s legacy up her sleeve, along with a nicer boyfriend for Nell. But what’s distinctive about The Wren, the Wren has less to do with plot development or even the energy and finesse with which it handles different voices and textures than with the way it plays the movement of the story against the movement of thought and feeling. Just as Enright’s sentences are carefully worked but also close to ordinary speech, the novel is filled with time shifts and changes of perspective but also traces an emotional line that’s clear and direct. Like all of Enright’s fiction, it’s stringently unsentimental but in the end not cold. After a great deal of complicated feeling, it’s a relief to see Carmel enjoying her remodeled house, cooking impressive meals with the help of Nell’s new partner, and turning significant attention to her garden.

As for Nell, Enright has a phenomenal ear for generational speech patterns and catchwords (“cursed,” “chaotic,” “making out”—a term no one used in her part of the world before the arrival of Netflix). Whether Nell’s plotline constitutes a properly millennial agon, or a slightly brusque interrogation of the theme of masochistic sexuality in a feminist age, remains an open question. Either way, what stands out is the lack of condescension with which it’s handled. One large absence in the book is the Covid-19 pandemic, which seems simply not to happen in this version of history. At the same time it’s everywhere in Nell’s claustrophobic journaling. In a March 2020 dispatch on the early days of the pandemic in these pages, Enright concluded, disturbingly, “I cannot find a tone.” Nell’s wonderfully loose and inventive writing, filled with free-floating anxiety, descriptions of YouTube videos, and a passionate concern for the birds outside the window, suggests that she found it.