The Wren, the Wren

Starred review from July 17, 2023
The whip-smart latest from Booker winner Enright (The Gathering) explores the complex legacy of a revered Irish poet. It begins in contemporary Dublin with late poet Phil McDaragh’s granddaughter Nell, a recent university graduate who falls for and remains attached to a man despite suspecting he’s being unfaithful and feeling underwhelmed by the sex (“not even bad in a good way”). Enright contrasts Nell’s defiant and free-spirited narration with that of Carmel, Nell’s caring and practical mother, who ponders her daughter’s future and the pain of Phil’s abandonment of her mother, Terry, when she was battling breast cancer. Phil’s legacy is present within the novel in two forms: his poems, resplendent with images of birds and bucolic lyricism, which Enright presents in their entirety; and his troubling personal life, both as an absentee father and a toxic partner to various women (a former lover and fellow poet’s relationship with him is characterized on a Wikipedia page as “abusive”). Enright imbues a sense of great importance to domestic incidents, such as in a flashback to Nell as a child, when Carmel strikes her after she acts out by breaking a light fixture, but the tone is far from despondent; the prose fizzes with wit and bite. Enright’s discomfiting and glimmering narrative leans toward a poetic sense of hope.

Starred review from July 15, 2023
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.

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Starred review from August 1, 2023
Phil McDaragh may have been one of Ireland's most celebrated poets, but as a husband and father, he was a cad. Phil stormed out of his marriage as his wife was dying of cancer, deserting her and their two daughters, Imelda and Carmel. This abandonment will have repercussions for generations. The story is told primarily in the voices of single-mother Carmel and her adult daughter, Nell, who suffer from their inability to form healthy romantic or familial relationships. Nell can't break free from a psychologically and sexually abusive affair, while Carmel flounders in a sedate relationship with a nice but uninspiring man, only to walk out on him during his own health crisis. The paradox of Phil's legacy informs Nell's and Carmel's definition of love for each other as well as potential partners. Man Booker Prize and Carnegie Medal winner Enright's luminous examination of the fallout from parental rejection and the emotional toll it exacts over time evokes the profound sense of confusion, mistrust, and denial those involved experience. While Carmel and Nell have different reactions to the often surreal McDaragh family trauma, both are indelibly scarred by this seminal act of betrayal. Enriched by searing if beautiful poetry, Enright's beseeching novel thrums with desire, heartache, and connection.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from November 3, 2023

The women of the McDaragh family have poor taste in men. In '50s Dublin, Terry falls madly for Phil, an aspiring poet. Their brief and stormy marriage ends when Terry becomes ill. Unable to handle the crisis, Phil abandons her and their young daughters, parlaying his middling fame into a faculty job and a new life in the United States. A few decades on, daughter Carmel, somewhat indifferent to men, finds herself pregnant after a one-night stand. Nevertheless, she embraces single motherhood with a fiercely protective love for her daughter, Nell. Later yet, Nell's bad choice in men is the bullying Felim, who casually uses and abuses her. Their breakup sends her into a tailspin of depression and a globe-trotting life to escape her unhappiness. VERDICT This generational story alternates between Nell and Carmel, with a little time out for Phil and his poetry. Channeling her inner Sally Rooney as twentysomething Nell, Booker Prize winner Enright (The Gathering) is as convincing as when writing about Carmel, a woman closer to her own age. A poignant novel by a writer in peak form.--Barbara Love

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