KEY POINTS:
Taking Pictures is Anne Enright's first story collection to be published since her first, The Portable Virgin, in 1991, and follows so closely on the heels of last year's Man-Booker-winning novel The Gathering that it should catch the momentum of its success.
This is fortunate because, atmospher-ically, Taking Pictures shares much with The Gathering, and readers who appreciated Enright's hard, clear eye for the secret life of ordinary families, their unspoken truths and accusations and the accommodations people make with disappointment and betrayal will be pleased to find these themes played out again and again in these brief snapshots of the moments when characters connect or break with others.
The two great themes of sex and death dominate Enright's fiction - these and the logical conclusion of all that sex, procreation. The stories in Taking Pictures foreground the physical body, the limitations and transgressions of the flesh.
There are pregnant bodies, bodies ravaged by cancer, anorexia or motherhood, bodies drinking, ageing, copulating, dying. They are also, in various ways, stories about what it means to be Irish at home and abroad, though this is never made explicit; rather, it is a sensibility hinted at in seemingly throwaway remarks.
In Here's to Love, when a friend tells the narrator that his wife is "up and down", she observes, "up and down" is Irish for anything at all - from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about it, a psychotic is more usually "not quite herself".' In Switzerland she offers an outsider's view, that of an American in Dublin, sleeping with an Irishwoman. "And it is all a joke. That's the other thing about Dublin.
The thing you don't understand is that they are always only joking, even in bed. Until you leave - then they stand outside your window in the middle of the night, screaming and throwing bottles. Or they take an overdose, maybe, just for a joke."
This intimate, inseparable twinning of comedy and acute pain is what gave The Gathering its savage brilliance, and has a particularly Irish flavour, subtler and more real than the cliches foreigners demand. "But can we, from now, for ever, forget the froth on the milk and the weather in my f***ing hair?" says the woman with the American lover.
"I said I'd be Irish for her of a Tuesday, but could I have the rest of the week off?" says the narrator of Pillow, of the American room- mate who requested to share with an Irish person for the "ethnic mix". There are echoes, too, of the surrealism of her earlier work.
Her first novel, The Wig My Father Wore, featured a ghost, and here, in Caravan, the harassed mother of a family on a wet camping holiday becomes convinced that their caravan is stalked by the ghost of a woman who died in it. "Some stiffening kind of death. She died rigid, sitting on that banquette, playing solitaire."
Or is the ghost a manifestation of her own fears for her children, or of her own failures? "Michelle stood, and looked up, and wished that she was a different kind of mother - if there was a different kind of mother." Perhaps most insistently, these are pictures of parents and children and the complex blend of love and anger that fills the space between them.
Enright's gift is not just in the way she can look without flinching at the places most people prefer to turn away from, but also in her feel for language, for an image so stark and striking that you carry it with you.
In Honey, she describes women sexually infatuated with a particular man as looking "drenched" in his presence. "They stood with their arms slightly lifted from their sides, as though their fingers were dripping water."
The title Here's to Love captures the flavour of all these stories, in the way it manages to be mordant, weary and defiantly hopeful all at once. These are bleak stories, certainly, but they are also shockingly beautiful at times, and painfully funny.
Taking Pictures
By Anne Enright (Cape $34.99)
- OBSERVER
