Anne Enright: What Are You Like?

By PENELOPE BIEDER*

When Anne Enright's debut collection of short stories, The Portable Virgin, appeared in 1991, she was just 29 and working in fringe theatre in Ireland.

English critic Aidan Mathews sighed with satisfaction: "In sentence after sentence as cool and clear-headed as the moment a migraine lifts, these pained, precise, disquieting stories restore us to the strangeness of the lives we follow beneath the surface of the lives we lead."

The collection won the Rooney Prize, and the Dublin author's novel What Are You Like? achieved the shortlist of the Whitbread Novel Award of 2000.

It too dives "beneath the surface" with an intriguing, sometimes harrowing but always extraordinarily good story of twin girls separated at birth and unaware of each other's existence.

When their mother dies in childbirth their father Berts takes Maria, the nuns take Rose, and soon Berts is remarried, to Evelyn, who spends too much time puzzling over Maria and trying unsuccessfully to figure her out. When Maria gets a job in a clothes shop, Evelyn visits for the barest of reasons, to try on outfits, feeling that this is the only way she can get to see Maria.

"At least she was able to hold her head up in front of the neighbours and say, when asked, that Maria was between things. That is what you said about children these days, that they were between things - you did not say this was the place they had ended up." And of course Evelyn is right. Maria is trying on adulthood as if it too were a new dress.

Soon she is working in New York and managing to fall in love with the wrong sort of man. Her sister Rose leads a more sheltered life with her adopted family in Surrey, but both Maria and Rose have a sense of something missing in their lives.

After extricating herself from a desultory relationship with William, Rose decides to search for her birth parents.

In a cleverly constructed story, households are built up and then dissected. Family life is fragile, deceptive - when, at 11, Maria is taken to visit her real mother's parents on a farm, she is plunged into a horrifying, visceral world of animal sex, birth and death.

The Irish rain pours down, cows strain to calf in a sea of mud and blood, even the roast on the table is underdone, its blood matching the red roses on the serving dish. Maria is shocked at the disgust she feels for these poor, rural relatives.

Blood, with its endless meanings and symbolism, recurs to great effect throughout the book, and while there are certainly corrosive moments, Enright's dark, dream-like humour glances lightly across the big themes of genetics and religion and love, and manages to banish any incipient bleakness.

Enright's gift is so very Irish - she knows how to spin a great yarn.

Random House

$26.95

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.