Customer Reviews

What Are You Like? (a Jonathan Cape Original)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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).

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

The Author's concept of this odd book had to come from the seam of her eye where the mist and the rocks blow together like the brussel spouts of yesterday's backyard tire swing. If you liked this review, you'll love the book.

[2.5 stars] After reading THE GATHERING, the book that recently won Anne Enright the Man Booker Award, I picked up this earlier novel to see whether it would share the same preoccupations. It does, in its interest in exploring how women feel and think, its concern with the dynamics of mostly dysfunctional families, and its obsession with the grosser aspects of the human body. It shares the same ambience: Dublin and England, though here with some scenes in New York thrown in. Here too, Enright has the reader piece the story together in fragments as she jumps around in place and time. Here too, she comes up with passages that are unusual, even poetic, but too often maddening in their obliquity; the following paragraph is typical:

"That night Evelyn dreamed of sperm and the smell maddened her. It lingered in the morning and made her ashamed. It was her fifty-third birthday. Time to throw things out, she thought, and started with a plastic bag full of shoes that had taken the shape of her feet. Ghost steps, and all the wanderings she had never made, knotted at the top and left out for the bin men, waltzing in the quiet, in the rain."

The image of that bag of shoes is insightful and true. But although the final sentence is beautiful as poetry, it makes little sense as prose. And Evelyn's dream of sperm is entirely gratuitous, as are most of the physical references in the book. Here, for a comparatively innocuous example, is her description of children following their mothers into a department-store changing room: "They came in sometimes, the little Caesars, all new beside the bellies that they had sloughed off." A striking image, certainly, but when people are persistently reduced to bags, pipes, and plumbing, they quickly lose their humanity.

I can't say much in detail about the book without giving the plot away. Suffice it to say that there are two principal characters, young women in their early twenties for most of the book. Enright is quite good at plumbing their psychological lives: their pale aspirations, their failures in work or love, and the compromises they make to keep on living. For both women, for different reasons, are incomplete. Yes, there is a happier ending, perhaps a little too good to be true. But is it worth undergoing such a fractured and frustrating journey to get there?

At first, I didn't like Anne Enright's novel at all. I found it very hard to identify with any of the characters. Anne Enright's style of writing is quite singular, and takes some time getting used to. It took about a hundred pages before I really started to enjoy this composition.

Enright's narrative jumps forwards and backwards through time, leaping from one perspective to another. The restless nature of this novel makes it very hard prey to track down. Anne Enright's prose is very subtle too. Incidents flash by, but the gun kicks very little. I admittedly found myself lost in the early part of the novel, especially when minor characters came to the forefront, and then disappeared. This novel either seems as though it has been culled too well or not enough. There's quite a lot of extraneous material that hints at a broader narrative, with good ideas dispatched all too soon, so that you almost never get a handle on them in the first place. This novel stands comparison with Trezza Azzopardi's Booker nominated 'The Hiding Place'. Azzopardi also has a quite developed and unique style, and her narrative also flits through time, and from person to person. Yet, even although Azzopardi doesn't give a time and date for each chapter as Enright does, you're never ever lost in 'The Hiding Place' as you are in 'What are you Like?'. Enright's novel is mostly the tale of two identical twin sisters divided at birth: Maria and Marie. One gets the impression that maybe Enright thought about keeping these two very similar names for her main protagonists: thankfully, Marie is also called Rose. When their mother dies during labour, Berts, their father, decides that he can only cope with one of the twins. It doesn't seem to matter particularly which one. Thus are the twins divided. Rose is adopted, and brought up in an English middle class home. Maria, brought up by Berts and new wife Evelyn, rebels and runs off to New York and goes a little mad. We seem to get more of her childhood than Rose's. Maria falls in love with the wrong man, and comes across a photograph of herself in his wallet when 12 - but the background and the "parents" are completely unfamiliar. Rose contemplates marriage with a Yuppie, and has an urge to find the mother who gave her up. Her quest brings treasures she never quite expected...

This novel is mostly viewed through the eyes of women, with Berts the only strong male character. It's almost as if Enright has to remind you of his presence towards the end, by his having a drunken kiss with a female co-worker at a Christmas party. It's a well-told incident, but I've a suspicion that it's only been included to add a bit of melodrama. Evelyn, Berts' wife, is considering leaving him, and then she finds a letter from a strange woman... There are so many perspectives from the women characters that you can often put the book down, and forget where you were when you start to read again. Towards the end, the twins' mother, Anna, speaks from the dead in the first person. This is done so matter of factly that no hint of the supernatural is ever allowed to shine through. Anna tells the story of her life, but her privileged voice doesn't ever really seem to say anything significant. Although the divide between the generations of these women is done very well indeed: Evelyn and Anna spent their youth in a very different world from Maria and Rose. Berts notices that women's behaviour has changed a lot over his lifetime, and has to get used to the idea that women are drinking a lot more nowadays and that the term 'typing pool' is no longer politically correct or even employable.

Enright's prose is so subtle that it does take a long time for you to feel anything for the characters. Indeed, there are glimpses of the Kennedy family background, of the boy Valentine gone mad which hints at the cause of Maria's mental distress and of her mother's eccentricity. The resolution is also a quite trite and maybe a little too concise. However, Enright's prose is still a joy to read. She has a lot of wit, and there are great one-liners. She's also incredibly good at capturing the consciousness of her protagonists. There's a delicious passage where Maria's mind's eye sees a lamp and a coat in a window across the road as a hanging body. Even though she knows that the delusion is not real, her imagination still gets her incredibly worked up. Overall, this is a bitsy book, which doesn't quite fulfil all its ambitions. However, if you stick with it as I did, then you'll find Anne Enright's novel hugely rewarding towards the end.

The story line could be really interesting but the style of writing is hard to take. It reads more like a poem than a novel. The story itself is all over the place. The time and place are different in every chapter. It's very fragmented. I won't be reading anything else by this author.

This is the kind of thing that can get you a bit knotted as a reader but when I put it down I realised that I think I had read something that was extraordinary. It is full of echoes that bouce around from one twin to another. The language is really beautiful, I thought it was actually closer in some ways to poetry because althought the story is quite simple, it is also very hard to pin down. As an Irish reader I felt it was really out there and it touched me in a way the more cliched stuff doesn't. Yes you have to work at it, but in the end you have something that is really rich. I actually immediately wanted to read it again.