MUM’S THE WORD ON THE NASTY SIDE OF HOLLYWOOD
If MeToo was a thunderbolt that exploded the carefully sealed lid off the film industry’s treatment of women, then Anne Enright’s new novel is a piercing study of the damage inflicted by that glittering world on one of the stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
As it moves deftly from rural Ireland of the 1930s where the so-called fitups, or travelling players, run by the legendary Anew McMaster were one of the few forms of entertainment to post-war New York and Hollywood, and back to dreary 1970s Dublin, Enright’s writing is beautiful and assured, threaded with a dry wit and astute observations of the toll of the actor’s – or actress’s – calling.
Although she delves into some of the darker corners of human existence, from sexual violence and coercion to madness and human frailty, she is quietly optimistic rather than despairing.
Katherine O’Dell the protagonist is an icon of Irish theatre who in her youth enjoyed a stint as a Hollywood star. With her dyed auburn hair and 40 -shades-of -green wardrobe, as demanded by her agent, it is tempting to compare her to the late great Maureen O’Hara but in her acknowledgements, Enright stresses that all her key characters are fictional.
The novel opens as Norah, the narrator and Katherine’s daughter, a middle-aged and far more watchful figure than her flamboyant mother, attempts to piece together from memory, newspaper cuttings and her mother’s personal effects, the story of her extraordinary life.
Her mother is dead now, dying in her fifties after suffering a bout of madness and committing a sensational crime.
Norah must chart the events that led inexorably to that final act of desperation while in the process she discovers more about her own identity and reveals the twists and turns of her own, far less compelling, coming of age.
Mother and daughter could hardly have led more different lives. Katherine was a megawatt star, the real deal, complete with all the insecurities and vanities of that species.
Norah, a writer, has been married forever to her old college sweetheart, a figure who never comes alive and remains frustratingly in the background of the narrative, She lives in a modest house in Bray and her two children are either in college or in training.
The deep love Norah has for her husband and children replicates her own childhood. Norah adored her mother and the feeling was mutual: the strength of their bond, devoid of rivalry or jealousy or any of the usual negative clichés of female relationships is the backbone of the novel. As Enright said recently on BBC’s Desert Island Discs: ‘People’s mothers are big to them, one way or the other... And maybe writers are better at admitting that.’’
Mother and daughter lived in Dartmouth
Square, Dublin with their beloved housekeeper and Katherine’s various romances and salons provide the reader with an entertaining insight into what passed for bohemian circles in Dublin during the 1970s where the matriarchal core of their world is so self-sufficient that the absence of Norah’s father is hardly felt.
Thematically this is familiar territory for the Booker winner and it is a measure of her originality that it never gets old.
‘An entertaining insight into what passed for bohemian circles in 1970s Dublin’