2020-03-07 New Zealand Listener

MARCH 7 2020 LISTENER 51

by SARAH LANG

A

nne Enright writes excellent

novels. I particularly enjoyed 2007

Booker Prize-winner The Gathering,

about a dysfunctional Irish family

congregating for a funeral.

Enright’s seventh novel, Actress, is

also about family ties – not just the

good and the bad but the grey area

in-between. It’s narrated by Norah,

a middling novelist who has lived

her life in the reflected glow – and

in the shadow – of her mother,

Katherine, a famous Irish actress.

The book’s cover image is a

photograph of Carrie Fisher as a

child, watching from the wings

as her mother, Debbie Reynolds,

performs on stage. Enright recre-

ates that scene, just slotting in

her own characters.

We meet Norah in her late

middle age, some years after

Katherine has died. When a mid-

dling journalist visits, wanting to

write about Katherine, Norah decides to

write her mother’s story herself – and she

relates Katherine’s life in what feels a bit

like a memoir within a novel.

As Norah remembers it, most of

Katherine’s life was a performance. “She

was never happy. Though she put on a

damn fine show.” Even Norah’s 21st was

a staged opportunity for the well-off,

the influential, the journalists (one of

whom spelt Norah’s name wrong). “The

headline, the article, it all points to that

thing, the actress and her overshadowed

child. The picture adds to the lie that I

am a poor copy of my mother, that she

was timeless and I am not – the iconic

gives birth to the merely human. But that

was not how it was between us.” There

are certainly some beautiful moments in

this mother-daughter relationship. But is

Norah choosing to remember the good

and minimise the bad?

K

atherine never tells Norah who her

father is. “We got on so very well

without him,” Norah says. “Or, more

properly, without any of them: the good

man, the bad man, the lover, monster,

vampire, knight in shining armour,

the many different men my father’s

absence spawned.” Two of these

men are awful people, belittling,

undermining and gaslighting

Katherine (as an actress and a

person) under a veil of “elabo-

rate courtesy”. When Katherine

fades into professional irrel-

evance, she doesn’t react well,

to say the least.

I quite like an unreliable nar-

rator who makes you question

the slippery nature of truth

and memory. But we never get

a real sense of who Norah is –

only who she is in relation to

her mother – and so it’s hard to

care about her as a character.

Actress probably sounded

great as an idea, but on the

page, it feels a little flimsy. I

kept waiting for something more

substantial that never came. It also

lacks Enright’s trademark (black)

humour.

Actress doesn’t live up to the high

expectations set by

Enright’s previous

novels. However,

she’s simply unable

to write a bad book.

This one is just

middling. l

ACTRESS, by Anne

Enright (Penguin,

$32.99)

I like an unreliable

narrator who makes

you question the

slippery nature of

truth and memory.

But we never

get a sense of

who Norah is.

The ties that

cease to bind

A daughter’s selective

account of her famous

actress mother forms

a memoir within Anne

Enright’s new novel.

G

ET

TY

(^) IM
AG
ES
Great idea, middling result: Anne Enright.