88 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
tragedy heightened by their proxim-
ity to the stage. We are told from the
start that Katherine’s drama will end
in a mental institution, after a strange
and salacious incident in which she
shoots a well-known producer in the
foot. And yet Katherine is also the
heroine of Norah’s story; the two are
close, loving, in a way that Enright’s
other mother-daughter pairs are not.
“I want to think that nothing between
us two ever went wrong,” Norah says.
They sit together on the sofa for whole
evenings at a time. “She put a cushion
on her lap for my head,” Norah recalls,
“and we smoked from the same pack,
as though smoking were some kind of
occupation.” Katherine travels often,
and her reunions with her daughter
are “astounding, joyous affairs, with
dancing and presents.”
But Norah can’t be sure where the
actress ends and her mother begins.
Katherine, she says, was a star “not
just on screen or on the stage, but at
the breakfast table also.” The scene
at home, as Norah describes it, has
the clichéd perfection of a movie set:
“The sun is coming through the win-
dow, the smoke from her cigarette
rises and twists in an elegant, dou-
ble strand.” Her mother makes toast
with marmalade, then takes three,
maybe four bites. To signal that she
has finished, she does a “little wavy-
over thing” with her hand. Afterward,
she might pick up the receiver of the
beige wall-mounted phone, or natter
on to young Norah, or to
the ceiling, or to the dog
waiting under the table for
crumbs. There is always
an audience. When Norah
is thirteen, her grandfather
dies, and Katherine breaks
the news to her “like a good
mother,” caressing her hair
and asking if she’s O.K. “She
did it all so perfectly,” Norah
says. “I did not think, for a
single second, that she might adore
him the way that I adored her.” If Kath-
erine was only playing the role of par-
ent, who was she—really?
Katherine O’Dell, we are told, made
her first appearance onstage at the age
of ten. She played a crocus. When, in
1939, the war came to England, her
parents—successful but itinerant stage
actors—moved the family to Ireland.
Eight years later, Katherine was back
in London, débuting in a play in the
West End. The show was a wild suc-
cess. The following year, now in New
York, she was reborn as an Irishwoman.
Her accent, like her bottle-red hair
and the apostrophe in her name, was
part of a carefully constructed fake. It
was her agent’s idea. “You are in Amer-
ica,” he told her. “You can be anything
you want to be.”I
f the story of Katherine’s rise con-
tains at least some element of mys-
tery, the story of her decline is rela-
tively straightforward. Like the careers
of countless actresses, its arc has ev-
erything to do with age, and, of course,
with sexism. “In those days, when a
woman hit thirty she went home and
shut the door,” Norah says. Katherine
stars in a hit film in L.A., but within
a year she is pregnant out of wedlock
and forced to retreat from the public
eye. She gives birth to Norah in Brook-
lyn, then travels incognito with her
daughter back to Ireland, where the
rest of her career will take place on
the stage. (Norah is never told who
her father is. Compared to the story
of Katherine’s rise, the question of her
origins strikes Norah as uninterest-
ing.) Katherine discovers that her fame
and desirability have already peaked.
She is only twenty-six.
The mother’s life is unravelling just
as the daughter’s is taking shape. As
Norah chronicles Katherine’s
experiences, we learn, inter-
mittently, of her own. She
writes about unremarkable
boyfriends and true loves,
about the trauma of sexual
violence and the boredom
of middle-aged marriage.
The scenes spool ahead into
the future and back into the
past: she grows up in Dub-
lin, buys a house by the sea,
can’t afford to heat it. The voice En-
right conjures for Norah is lissome
and intimate. She has an eye for the
unexpected and exacting image: the
British Embassy in 1972, days after
Bloody Sunday, “the roof just a few
blackened beams against a wet sky”;
the funeral of her mother’s longtime
housekeeper, in the mid-nineties, thefamily dressed in coats of “the same
lilac-coloured polyester.” These images
are associative and digressive, the way
memory is. The story is easy to follow
but difficult to reconstruct. But that
may be part of Enright’s point. Mak-
ing a narrative out of the inchoate past
inevitably entails selection—and per-
haps some level of deception.
In charging her narrator with the
task of excavation, Enright revisits
the premise she used in “The Gath-
ering.” Veronica, an affluent home-
maker, tries to reconstruct her broth-
er’s life after his suicide; like Norah,
she wants to write it all down. She
thinks she knows when things began
to go wrong for him, but to explain
it she needs to look further back, to
before either of them was born. Ve-
ronica’s story is made up mostly of
what she cannot know; she reimag-
ines what did take place or invents
what might have. Even events from
her lifetime are cast in doubt. Of the
turning point she has identified in her
brother’s life, she admits, “I am not
sure if it really did happen.”
But Norah is a different kind of
narrator, her mother a different kind
of subject. Fame leaves a material trail
in its wake. Norah visits the National
Library to review her mother’s papers,
cites photographs and newspaper clip-
pings and Pathé newsreels. But doc-
umentary evidence contains its own
fictions. Norah’s twenty-first-birthday
party is preserved in a photograph in
a newspaper spread: mother and
daughter in a jolly crowd, leaning in
around a cake. Images like these pur-
port to be a record of spontaneity; we
call them candids. But “it was all
staged,” Norah says. Still, she finds
that only when her mother is frozen
in time can she bring her into focus.
“The picture was such a fake,” she
says. “But the years have made it some-
how true.”A
re we reading the book that Norah’s
husband urged her to claim as her
own? Enright doesn’t say: the only ev-
idence of a completed work is the pages
in our hands. Every so often, the novel
shifts into the second person. The ad-
dressee is Norah’s husband. In these
sections, the mood is warm and ten-
der, and Enright shows herself to be a