Actress, by Anne Enright
ALEX CLARK
Actress By Anne Enright Jonathan Cape £16.99
Memorialising our parents is an inevitably ambiguous process.
Our constructions include childhood memories, both striking and indistinct, and distant periods, including their own early years, that we have not personally experienced.
There are also the intrusions of other figures, the ebb and flow of familial sympathy and tension, and the sense that what they were also constitutes a complex, fugitive part of our own identity.
But for the writer of fiction, such a frame can be immensely productive, offering the opportunity to range over generations and periods and, more crucially, to provide a distilled exploration of the difficulties we often undergo in granting to our parents a fully fledged, individual personhood.
If the person under consideration has also been a public figure, as is Katherine O’dell, Anne Enright’s titular character, then the experience is potentially even more fraught. In the first few pages of Actress, an arresting picture of Norah Fitzmaurice’s mother has emerged: hazel-eyed, holding a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in another, presiding over a party of theatrical types, ‘a shifting band of big, drinking men, all of them good company’, in her kitchen; and photographed for a diary column in that same kitchen, opening the door of her steamy new dishwasher, one of the first to arrive in Ireland.
But we also know that she died in the 1980s at 58, a few years after shooting a film producer in the foot and consequently being committed to a mental hospital. What, then, is the story?
It’s a story that Norah is trying to work out for herself. Now in middle age, long married and with two grown children, she is trying to piece together what made, and unmade, her mother, even as she knows that ‘I would swap all the information in the world for her happiness, and she was never happy.’
Enright is formidable in combining the concrete detail of lives – think of the extraordinary array of sibling portraits in her last novel, The Green Road – with an acute understanding of the inchoate lives of families: the push and pull of loyalty; the projection of desires; the smothering of disappointment and unhappiness.
Here she conjures the rollicking story of Katherine’s journey from an itinerant theatrical family – all Othello, musicals and ‘anecdotes of cheap disaster’ – to a brief period of fame in New York and Hollywood and thence to Dublin, where she trades in glamour and Irish intensity: ‘After Hollywood, she was all about emigrant nostalgia: she could miss the old sod while standing in her own kitchen, she used to say. And indeed, she often did.’
When she sings a Yeats poem, set to music on RTÉ’S opening night in 1961, ‘it was better than the moon landings’; when she assembles those hard-drinking men around her, ‘even their lechery was over-styled’.
But overlaying that story of celebrity and of a changing Ireland is the codependent relationship between her and Norah, the child who is frequently left waiting at home in the company of the housekeeper, and who, as she grows older, struggles to puzzle out her own sexual appetites. Shadowy but significant men – a priest turned therapist; the wounded producer; one of Norah’s lecturers – circle around them, flitting in and out of rooms, offering counsel and imposing their own implacable wills upon them, and turning them, in one way or another, into prey, commodities to be manipulated and deployed at will.
At some moments, we are reminded that Norah is addressing this memoir of her and her mother’s lives to her husband. At others, she seems entirely alone, an only child, her mother dead and her father unknown, a solitary in the narrative.
The prose is clear and droll – even dry – but with an undertow of anger and regret. At its heart is the feeling that to preserve a person’s life in memory takes up at least as much emotional energy as accommodating that person in reality; and that to pore over their remains is a question not of choice but of unavoidable reckoning. ‘What kind of a mother was she?’ a PHD student asks Norah. ‘Well,’ she replies. ‘She was mine.’
Which, as we all know, is only the start of the story.