THE WREN, THE WREN

The exceptional, multigarlanded Irish writer returns with a three-generation, woman-centered family portrait marked by “inheritance, of both trauma and of wonder,” and melodious, poetic echoes.

After a nonfiction book (Making Babies, 2012) and a novel (Actress, 2020) exploring parenting, Enright continues to mine this fertile territory, here considering the bonds between daughter Nell and mother Carmel, each influenced by Carmel’s father, Phil McDaragh, “the finest love poet of his generation,” also remembered for “the shouting and the hitting.” His titular poem, dedicated to Carmel, is a romantic vision of the bird, “so fierce and light / I did not feel / the push / of her ascent / away from me / in a blur of love….” But it’s Phil who, bit by bit, leaves for pastures and wives new, gifting responsibility and debt to his two daughters alongside the care of their mother, who’s dying of cancer. Carmel, in turn, “would not have a man in her life,” and Nell, raised cherished but fatherless, seems ill-equipped in her dealings with the opposite sex, notably when falling for Felim, a coercive, increasingly unkind figure. She’s also searching for her own niche as a writer, leaving Ireland to wander around Europe, then the world, in pursuit of a future. The narrative switches point of view among Nell, Carmel, and Phil, and Enright adapts her gifts of musical, seamless prose, wit, capacious insight, and textured personality to each in turn. Lyrical poems of birds punctuate the text, as do snatches of cruelty and violence between men and women, sisters, men and animals, even parents and children. But the familial connections are indelible and enduring. Carmel, watching a long-ago filmed interview with Phil, remembers how devastatingly easy it was to love him. Modern young woman Nell, reaching a place of “happy separateness,” watches it too: “The connection between us is more than a strand of DNA, it is a rope thrown from the past, a fat twisted rope, full of blood.”

Tender and truthful as ever, Enright offers a beguiling journey to selfhood.