What Are You Like?: A Novel [Hardcover]

Anne Enright (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2000

Anne Enright is one of Ireland's most exciting new writers, a beguiling storyteller of warm humor and wry lyricism. In her American debut, she gives us a novel of the fierce bonds of origin and the connections and disjunctions of family that will establish her as a wise, fresh voice in fiction. At the opening of What Are You Like? Berts, a new father, struggles to love his baby daughter, simultaneously mourning the wife who died giving her life. Raised in the shadow of his quiet grief, Maria finds herself at twenty in New York City, awash in nameless longing and falling in love with the wrong sort of man. Going through her lover's things, she finds a photograph of herself aged twelve, in clothes she's never worn, a place she's never been. It will send her home to Ireland, to the slow unraveling of a secret that may prove more devastating than Berts's long sadness, but more pregnant with possibility. Moving between Dublin, New York, and London, What Are You Like? is the story of a woman haunted by her missing self. Troubling and hilarious, it posits an unforgettable chaos theory of family, of daughters sent out into a world that is altered forever by their leaving, and of our helplessness against our fierce connection to our homes and the people who give us life. "This book is so sad that you want to laugh out loud. It deals with areas of experience and patterns of living that no one else has noticed. As Dylan Thomas said about At Swim-Two-Birds, 'If your sister is a big loud boozy girl, then give her this book.' " -- Colm Toibin

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Some novels you nibble away at, half unthinking. Anne Enright's prose bites back. The Irish author of The Portable Virgin and The Wig My Father Wore has produced a third book as unexpected and lively as a miracle child--or is it twins? She tells the story of a Dubliner whose mother died in childbirth. Maria is now 20, living in New York, cleaning houses, taking drugs, sleeping with strangers, and generally being in a funk. In a lover's bag, she finds an old photo of a girl who looks just exactly like herself, dressed in clothes she's never owned, posing with people she's never met. But this isn't some gooey, alternate-reality identity fantasy. Maria has, in fact, a twin sister. Though each is unknown to the other, we learn both their lives inside out as they head toward a giddily inevitable meeting.

This twinning tale suits Enright's style right down to the ground: Her mandate is to bump us into awareness, and if it takes double heroines, so be it. Her language does the rest of the work. On the very first page, for instance, she freshens the simple act of holding a baby into a joke: "And they handed her on from arm to arm, with the dip that people make when they give away a baby--letting her body go and guiding her head, as though it might not be attached. Nothing worse than being left holding the baby, they seemed to say, except being left with the baby's head." In fact, Enright is transfixed by the weirdness of the body, as when Maria visits a dairy farm: "She is too old to dip her fingers in the milk and let the calves suck. Though when she does, a feeling she has never had before goes straight up her arm and into her right nipple. Hello, farming." Enright writes fiction meant to surprise. But her message is surprisingly traditional: biology matters. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly

After a flawlessly rendered first chapter, Enright, an Irish broadcast journalist, short story writer and novelist (The Wig My Father Wore), struggles to keep the assorted pieces of her novel together; it is fractured like the family it illuminates. Maria Delahunty is born in Dublin in 1965, delivered from her dying mother, who is comatose from a brain tumor. Maria's father, Berts, brings the baby home, and along with his new wife, Evelyn, they decide "to love each other if they could." But Maria grows up conflicted about herself, unable to decide whether she should live in her middle-class home in Dublin or in New York City, "the country of the lost." There, she imagines she can reinvent herself, but she ends up cleaning apartments. At 20, she falls in love with a man who carries in his wallet a picture of someone who looks strangely like her as a 12-year-old. Meanwhile, in England, a young woman named Rose, adopted by a wealthy family and also feeling curiously ill at ease about herself, decides she is not talented enough to pursue a career as a violinist, and begins to shoplift. At the same point, the two young women begin to search for each other, leading them back to that impulsive decision the bumbling though well-meaning Berts first made in the maternity ward. Enright's story is compelling, and she writes effectively and generously in the points of view of her various characters, especially in the flat, resigned voices of Evelyn and Berts. The facets of her plot keep multiplying, however, and the cut-and-paste sentences are more perplexing than evocative, e.g., "His head was full of saxophones that turned into fish, and ordinary matchboxes filled with dread." The narratives of unhappy Maria and unhappy Rose take on a whining redundancy that mars an otherwise boldly written work. Agent, Heather Schroeder. (Sept.) Cahners Business Information.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press; First Edition. states edition (September 30, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871138166
• ISBN-13: 978-0871138163
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,346,553 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gorgeous language unlike anyone else, September 3, 2000

By 

Eric Wahl (Bozeman, MT, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Are You Like?: A Novel (Hardcover)

To call Anne Enright an "exciting new writer" is, of course, a somewhat backhanded compliment. Her works haven't been available in the states, which is a real shame, as most decent Irish Lit programs in American universities can point to Enright's astounding first story collection, The Portable Virgin, as a major work in Irish Postmodernism. What Are You Like?, her first domestically-available novel, continues in her fine, and, yes, exciting narratological style. I've rarely enjoyed the craft of a sentence as much as I have reading Enright's works, and this novel does not disappoint. In fact, this novel makes a great starting point from which to discover all of Anne Enright's works (check out Amazon.uk), such as her previous novel, The Wig My Father Wore, and, certainly, her mesmerizing story collection. Finally receiving critical notice in the states (including a featured short story in The New Yorker this year), it's surely fair to dub her "exciting and new." Now let's hope this is the beginning of something grand on this side of the Atlantic.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars rewards, September 19, 2001

By 

Mindy (St. Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Are You Like?: A Novel (Hardcover)

I found this book an intriging mix of confusion and satisfaction. There were long stretches where I was utterly confused about what was going on or why the author was telling me such things interspersed with really beautiful descriptions or some other really satisfying passage that was truly enjoyable.

Do I recommend this book? Sure. Just remember that the disjointed feeling is intentional. If that sort of thing does not put you off, then you will enjoy this book for the hidden treasures it contains.

I can also say that despite the fact that Maria "sleeps around" quite a bit, it was not sexually explicit. I appreciated this. I get so sick of reading books that boldly refuse to leave any of the details to the imagination (or not as the reader chooses).

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Out there., March 7, 2001

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: What Are You Like?: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is a strange and fractured narrative of the strange and fractured lives of identical twins separated at birth. When their mother dies of a brain tumor at the time of the girls' birth, their father, Berts, decides he can take care of only one of them. Naming her Maria, he quickly donates the other one, Marie (renamed Rose), for adoption. Maria stays with Berts in Dublin, while Rose moves around the world as the adopted daughter of a British doctor and his wife.

Both girls have big problems. Maria, from her earliest years, is always asking, "What are you like?" and looking into mirrors. Sometimes violent in arguments, she sleeps around, gets stoned, attempts suicide, and suffers a nervous breakdown. She believes she "does not have a talent for life." Rose is a sadist who taunts the foster children her parents take in, goading one boy into throwing a kitten through a window and later trying to drown him. She believes there is "a hole in her head, a hole in her life." Perhaps it is that hole she is trying to fill when she goes on her shoplifting expeditions. Neither girl seems to have profited in any way from "nurture"--only nature counts here, and finding your twin, even when you don't know you are a twin, is so compelling an urge that it overwhelms any attempt to live a normal life.

With her very staccato style of short sentences, most having the subject at the beginning, Enright machine-guns her story at the reader. Her in-the-face style is emphatic and unrelenting as her narrative jumps from 1965 to 1985 to 1971, etc., from Dublin to New York to London, and from Maria to Rose and, eventually, to Anna, their mother. The story is sometimes difficult to follow, as the connections which explain some of the episodes do not occur until later in the book. Tellingly, Enright has to rely on several extreme coincidences to bring the strands of her story together and achieve some sort of resolution. The plot, such as it is, strains credulity, and if you don't agree with her thesis regarding the inborn compulsion of twins to find each other, even when they don't know they are twins, you will find this book difficult to accept. Mary Whipple