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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

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Family madness, Irish style: The Green Road by Anne Enright

6/5/2015

6 Comments

 
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I am sorry. I can not invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad.

In 1980, in County Clare, ten-year-old Hanna is feeling the tension between her parents’ different backgrounds as her elder brother, Dan, announces he wants to be a priest. Eleven years later, Dan is most definitely not a priest, living with his girlfriend on the fringes of the New York art and gay scenes. Six years after that, in County Limerick, the eldest of the Madigan children, Constance, is a plump stay-at-home mother of three. Then it’s 2002 and we get to occupy the head of Emmet, an aid worker in Mali, learning (like Mrs Engels) the complexity of running a house with “staff” (p109):

You could be saving lives all day and be undone at the end of it by a plate of beans and bad lard. Literally saving lives. Because wars you can do, and famines you can do and floods are relatively easy, but no one survives when the cook scratches his arse and then decides not to bother washing his hands.

I’d have lapped up a novel by Booker-prize winner, Anne Enright, however it was described to me, but the blurb of this one did have me a little confused. It led me to expect something along the lines of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, with its promise of adult children returning home for one last Christmas. But the glimpses of the lives of the four siblings over more than two decades seemed to be leading me in an altogether different direction. But where? Finally I decided it was about illness and suffering, about compassion and its limits: the mother, Rosaleen, taking to her bed when upset about her son’s vocation (her ambitions for her children radically different from those of the mothers in John Boyne’s novel about the priesthood); Dan’s friends and acquaintances dying of AIDS; Constance feeling abandoned as she undergoes hospital tests for breast cancer; the challenge of staying healthy in a hot climate exacerbated by Emmet’s girlfriend’s insistence on bringing a dog into the house. Then there was Hanna, grown up now, struggling like Ari in After Birth (p188):

It was true that Hanna got pissed as soon as she left the baby, but it was also true that she never left the baby, or hardly ever. She mixed up vodka in a fruit juice bottle to bring on a girls’ night out and it was supposed to be a joke – the label said ‘Innocent’ – but she finished it on the way into town

But in the second half we are back with the widowed mother’s histrionics over the turkey, her small-mindedness and her guilt. Few can evoke the disappointments of family as pithily as Anne Enright yet, I’m afraid, by the time we got there, I didn’t care as much as I thought I ought. There are well-drawn characters in this novel, and fine writing too, with a subtle blend of pathos and humour, like an Irish Anne Tyler. Yet, despite the globetrotting, like with Anne Tyler’s latest novel, she seems to be revisiting old ground. That’s not necessarily a criticism, when both Annes cover the territory so well, but, with so much exciting new writing around this year, I’d hoped for something more. Thanks to Vintage for my review copy.

With review copies of six novels published tomorrow (7th May) please excuse the frantic pace of this week’s posting. You can expect the fourth of the six tomorrow with the latest from another prize-winning author, Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins.

 

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
6 Comments
Safia Moore link
6/5/2015 05:23:09 am

It's interesting that you mention Anne Tyler and Kate Atkinson in your review, Anne. Don't you think that established authors such as those two and Anne Enright have such loyal readerships that they are rather expected to come up with 'more of the same' in each new book? The sample I read of The Green Road is beautifully written, acutely observed, but I really feel I've read it all before in the Irish diaspora style narratives that sell very well in New York and Boston. Good luck to Anne Enright in her new role as Irish Laureate of Fiction and no doubt this book will do well for her and her publisher, but I'm more enthusiastic about the likes of Lisa McInerny and Colin Barrett than the Irish 'old school' of literary fiction.

Reply
Annecdotist
6/5/2015 08:02:07 am

Interesting point, Safia, but nevertheless I'd have thought the Booker prize winner would have expected she'd have more flexibility. I think Kate Atkinson has moved around a bit more in her style, with a strong collection crime novels but now seems to be returning to her original territory but a whole lot stronger (as I hope you'll see tomorrow).
I think you're right, The Green Road travels familiar territory, but does it very well. But I'm a lot more excited by Lisa McInerney

Reply
Norah Colvin link
7/5/2015 06:12:39 am

I love the quote you have used to open your post. Coming from a large family myself I can identify with the sentiments!
I also found a line from another quote quite significant - "no one survives when the cook scratches his arse and then decides not to bother washing his hands." The best laid plans, the most careful of practices and your life is subject to the whim of another.
I enjoyed reading your review. Thanks for sharing.

Reply
Annecdotist
7/5/2015 07:05:00 am

Thanks, Norah, I didn't realise at the time but both these quotes are from the sections involving the same brother Emmet though at different points in his life. The first is when he daren't invite his flatmate, an African student with no family around him, to his mother's home for Christmas (of course he doesn't have to come out and say this). But the second, when he's living in Mali with his girlfriend, was probably the part of the book I most enjoyed, and was certainly with the locals in thinking her insensitive in wanting to make a dog part of the household.

Reply
Charli Mills
7/5/2015 12:19:25 pm

Reader expectations are hard to gauge (our own included). I often wonder at the disconnect between book blurbs and the actual book.

Reply
Annecdotist
8/5/2015 09:22:00 am

Blurbs can be dreadful and I often wonder if they've been written by someone who has only read the opening of the book. But coming from the other side of this now, I know how hard it is to write something concise and enticing that's also a fair reflection of the actual novel.

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