THE NEWYORKER, MARCH 16, 2020 87
Enright’s latest narrator must reckon with her mother’s celebrity.
BOOKS
A LONE STAR
Fame and family in Anne Enright’s “Actress.”
BY SARAH RESNICK
ILLUSTRATION BY ANJA SLIBAR
P
artway through “Actress” (W. W.
Norton), Anne Enright’s capti-
vating seventh novel, the narrator,
Norah, advances a theory about her
mother’s rise to fame. Katherine
O’Dell, who died at the age of fifty-
eight, the same age her daughter is
now, was a grande dame of the Irish
theatre. Her four-decade-long career,
which began in the nineteen-forties,
brought her to Broadway, to Holly-
wood, to avant-garde productions of
Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett.
This ascendance, Norah insists, was
instantaneous. “A star is born not
made,” she aphorizes. “Whatever a
star has, they had it all along.”
This notion has a charming sim-
plicity. In the face of celebrity’s spe-
cial incandescence, perhaps there is
no need for an origin story of mun-
danities like talent and hard work. But
these days the taxonomy of the fa-
mous has been expanding ever down-
ward (we have a Z-list now), and
Norah’s formulation collapses under
scrutiny. Of course stars are made: it
takes connections or coincidences or
both to find your way to the top—and
publicity to stay there. This is part of
why we have always found celebrities
so transfixing. “The whole media con-
struction of stars encourages us to
think in terms of ‘really,’ ” Richard Dyer
wrote in “Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars
and Society,” his classic study of ce-
lebrity, from 1986. “Really” as in, What
is she really like? It’s the simultaneity
of constructed persona and real per-
son that draws us in.
For Norah, this paradox persists
even twenty-five years after her moth-
er’s death. A married novelist with two
grown children—that is, with stories
of her own—she is still drawn to the
story of Katherine O’Dell’s making.
She isn’t the only one: Norah gets an
e-mail, and then a visit, from a young
doctoral student who is writing a dis-
sertation that will offer her view of
what Katherine was really like. The
student promises to engage with the
actress’s “radical subjectivity,” to “de-ico-
nise her and show her as an agent in
the world.” She wants to know about
things like Katherine’s “sexual style.”
Norah doesn’t want to think about
these things; she suspects that they say
more about the student than they do
about Katherine O’Dell. If fame is a
mirror, for Norah the task of parsing
resemblance is especially complicated.
Hours after the student leaves, Norah
is still sulking about the cannibaliza-
tion of her mother’s story. Her hus-
band, no longer able to mask his irri-
tation, asks, “Why don’t you write it
yourself ?” Norah, who has published
five novels, has yet to write the book
she “needed to write,” the one “that
was shouting to be written.” The fol-
lowing morning, she buys a ticket to
London, where Katherine was born,
and begins her accounting.
E
nright, who is Irish, is drawn to
stories about troubled families. In
“The Gathering” (2007), her fourth
novel, which won the Man Booker
Prize, the restless narrator returns
home for her brother’s wake and tries
to make sense of his suicide. “The
Green Road” (2015) tells of the Madi-
gan clan, their fortunes and misfor-
tunes over the course of three decades.
At the center of these households are
mothers who are headstrong, capri-
cious, impossible to please. (In both
books, a daughter gives her mother
an expensive scarf, only to be cru-
elly rebuffed.)
Norah and Katherine form another
tragic mother-daughter pair—their
