SHORT STORIES: Taking Pictures By Anne Enright, Jonathan Cape, 227pp, £12.99 In her new collection, Anne Enright vividly depicts the petty whirlwinds and small, stupid mistakes of ordinary lives, and she records the quiet revelations, writes Claire Messud.
ANNE ENRIGHT'S RANGE, as a writer, is daunting: from the lush and literary historical landscape of The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch to the unsparingly direct comedy of her non-fiction account of motherhood, Making Babies, Enright has amply demonstrated her imposing talents. The haunting forcefulness of her most recent novel, The Gathering, winner of last year's Man Booker Prize, was thus no surprise; and yet, the voice of its protagonist, Veronica Hegarty, was a triumphant culmination of her gifts, a compelling marriage of ironic immediacy and lyric flight.
Concise and often glancing, the stories in Enright's new collection Taking Pictures differ considerably from her last book: many of them are, indeed, like pictures, the sharply focused depiction of a moment. But taken together, they resemble The Gathering in their honesty, in the sudden, surprising recognitions they will elicit in their readers. She vividly depicts the petty whirlwinds and small, stupid mistakes of ordinary lives, and she records, too, the quiet revelations. It may seem unlikely to compare her to William Trevor, when the textures of their prose styles are so unalike -- his smooth and elegant, hers often thrillingly jagged - but in these stories, Enright pursues an intriguingly parallel course.
For example, in Green, she gives voice to the long-held resentment of an unnamed small-town organic farmer for the town's successful restaurateur, Gertie. Both town girls are graduates of "the 'better' school - St Matilda's . . . six years of misery so you could catch a man with a better-cut suit and maybe a four-wheel drive." Gertie has, of course, landed the suited man and the four-wheel drive; but the narrator, too, has done well. Part of her rage at Gertie is rage, simply, at being still, or again, in this town. It is a world, and an experience, Trevor knows intimately, and conjures masterfully. Enright's character, however, articulates not the resignation of women in such situations, but the fury. Whereas Trevor might elide the most unseemly interior writhing, providing us instead with the narrator's cool professional dealings with her enemy and leaving us to deduce, through traces, the sentiment beneath, Enright gives it to us straight, the unstinting rant of a woman who need not stand on ceremony with us, her readers. Many of Enright's stories are written in this exhilarating mode.
SUCH CONSISTENT VITALITY is essential, in a collection in which no story is longer than 15 pages, and one a mere five pages. Inevitably, some pieces are more distinct, more powerful, than others. Among the finest is Honey, a story that was written for and received the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award. In it, a woman named Catherine struggles with the illness and death of her mother: "Catherine's mother was dying, far too young and far too painfully, of cancer. So as well as all the phone calls and the ferrying, there was the mother thing, which is to say, too much complacency and too much love." At her side is her partner, Tom, "sadly perfect since these days; there was always food in the fridge and clean T-shirts in the basket, and silence when silence was the necessary thing"; but the sexual element of their relationship has been suspended by Catherine's grief. Instead, she fantasises about a professional acquaintance named Phil Brogan, who invites her for a business weekend away at a country hotel. When she goes, fast upon her mother's eventual death, the weekend proves - as it must - charged with a sexual tension that is ultimately defused not by either party, but by a swarm of bees.
Catherine's realisation of her passionate will to live discomfits her; and it awakens her, too, to the irrelevance of Brogan himself: "She was ashamed of what she had felt as she stepped away from her mother's grave. That lightness - it was desire. And it was vast. The smell of the air and of the soil and the grass; Tom not supporting her with his arms so much as holding her to the skin of the earth. It was like she could fuck anything: the Killarney lakes and the sky that ran over them, and posh hotels with waffle-cloth robes, and the pink scent of a rose that showed grey in the darkness, and the whole lovely month of May. She could swim in it, and swallow it, and cram it into her in each and every possible way. All of it, that is, except for this unpleasant man, who could not face his own consequences . . ."
Many of the women in Enright's world experience, in one way or another, this ravenous hunger for life. They are thwarted by their own blindness (as in the tender Pale Hands I Loved, Beside the Shalamar, about a woman's discovered love for her mentally unstable roommate), by their family and friends (as in Little Sister, about a woman's sacrifice of her independence for her anorexic sibling; or in Yesterday's Weather, in which a new mother feels trapped by the consuming unknown that is her infant; or Caravan, in which another mother wrestles with the surreal effort of a family caravan holiday) or by their romantic mistakes (as in The Bad Sex Weekend, the title of which speaks for itself).
But Enright's characters are granted their epiphanies, too: the very imaginations that feed their hungers also keep them aloft. Kitty, the protagonist of In the Bed Department, is a shop-worker, a struggling single mother in her 40s who falls pregnant in a casual relationship - or else is experiencing menopause, she isn't wholly sure which. A miscarriage - or some other change of life - ensues. But in her mind, this event wonderfully occasions not dismay but elation: "Her life was changing, that was for sure . . . But "'Up or down?' she wondered. 'Up or down?' . . . It had been a baby, she knew it. How could it be down, when she felt such joy." It is, for Kitty, such a certainty that the story's final sentence needs no question mark.
Whatever their circumstances, whatever their fates, the characters in this thrilling collection are fully alive. Their liberations, or revelations, come in unexpected places, in unexpected ways. Their lives are, on the surface, as limited and compromised as those in many a William Trevor story, and their trajectories as hauntingly poignant; but Enright gives us something else: the flip-side, the upside down, the inside. She delivers her characters naked. She gets under the skin.
Claire Messud's most recent novel, The Emperor's Children, was published in 2006