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Anne Enright

Actress: A Novel Hardcover – March 3, 2020

by Anne Enright (Author)

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Longlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction

A brilliant and moving novel about celebrity, sexual power, and a daughter’s search to understand her mother’s hidden truths.

Katherine O’Dell is an Irish theater legend. As her daughter, Norah, retraces her mother’s celebrated career and bohemian life, she delves into long-kept secrets, both her mother’s and her own. Katherine began her career on Ireland’s bus-and-truck circuit before making it to London’s West End, Broadway, and finally Hollywood. Every moment of her life is a performance, with young Norah standing in the wings. But the mother-daughter romance cannot survive Katherine’s past or the world’s damage. With age, alcohol, and dimming stardom, Katherine’s grip on reality grows fitful. Fueled by a proud and long-simmering rage, she commits a bizarre crime.

As Norah’s role gradually changes to Katherine’s protector, caregiver, and finally legacy-keeper, she revisits her mother’s life of fiercely kept secrets; and Norah reveals in turn the secrets of her own sexual and emotional coming-of-age story. Her narrative is shaped by three braided searches―for her father’s identity; for her mother’s motive in donning a Chanel suit one morning and shooting a TV producer in the foot; and her own search for a husband, family, and work she loves.

Bringing to life two generations of women with difficult sexual histories, both assaulted and silenced, both finding―or failing to find―their powers of recovery, Actress touches a raw and timely nerve. With virtuosic storytelling and in prose at turns lyrical and knife-sharp, Enright takes readers to the heart of the maddening yet tender love that binds a mother and daughter.

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From the Publisher

Review

“Anne Enright writes so well that she just might ruin you for anyone else. . . . Stripped raw of any sentimentality, the result is a critique, a confession, a love letter―and another brilliant novel from Anne Enright.”
- Ron Charles, Washington Post

“Gorgeously written fiction. . . . Enright’s unflinching portrait . . . is scrupulously developed and painfully moving.”
- Wendy Smith, Boston Globe

“There is something that seems effortless about Ms. Enright’s writing―an illusion, of course, but one brilliantly sustained.”
- Sam Stacks, Wall Street Journal

“Captivating”
- Sara Resnick, The New Yorker

“Intoxicating”
- Mary Gordon, New York Times

“Another triumph for Enright: a confluence of lyrical prose, immediacy, warmth, and emotional insight.”
- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

From the Back Cover

Praise for Anne Enright:

"With Anne Enright, we are always in the country of the first-rate. Her work is stark, clear, authoritative, funny and inventive. We come away from her books consistently refreshed and renewed. She understands the full capacity of our stories and our language, braiding them together with apparent ease."
– Colum McCann, winner of the National Book Award and author of Let the Great World Spin

Praise for The Green Road:

A Washington Post Best Fiction Book of the Year

"Hugely readable…The Green Road should confirm Enright’s status as one of our greatest living novelists."
– John Sutherland, The Times

"Anne Enright has been writing brilliant, glittering fiction for 25 years…[H]er gaze is cool…[H]er eye is lethal…The surgical precision of her writing can…make you feel that she can, in Wordsworth’s words, ‘see into the life of things.’ Anne Enright is a master."
– Christina Patterson, Sunday Times

Praise for The Forgotten Waltz:

Best Book of the Year (Vogue)

"Enright’s razor-sharp writing turns every ordinary detail into a weapon, to create a story that cuts right to the bone."
– New York Journal of Books

Product details

Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (March 3, 2020)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1324005629
ISBN-13: 978-1324005629
Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1 x 9.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Customer Reviews: 7 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,052 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #148 in Mothers & Children Fiction
- #805 in Historical Fiction (Books)
- #445 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction

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A Reader

What a dull disappointment

Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2020

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

This is such a disappointment. Feels like Enright, usually such a gorgeous, fearless writer, could have penned this in her sleep. This subject doesn't remotely capture her talent, her usual ferocity or wicked humor. It's a long-winded, conventional account of an actress's silly, uninvolving life, told by her daughter. I barely recognize Enright in it. Surprisingly, disappointingly dull.

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Kate Vane

Many kinds of love

Reviewed in the United States on February 24, 2020

Format: Hardcover

Actress is a novel in the guise of a biography or perhaps a memoir. It is the story of Katherine O’Dell, famed Irish actress, sometime star of Broadway and Hollywood, as told by her daughter, Norah.

It begins with a long, beautifully meandering series of images as Norah attempts to capture the essence of her mother, the intersection between public and private, the intimate moments, and their shared place at the heart of the stylish parties in their Dublin home.

Then it shifts into the style of a conventional biography, beginning with Katherine’s grandparents. Norah visits her mother’s birthplace, which isn’t, it emerges, Ireland at all. The most Irish of Irish actresses is perhaps Katherine’s greatest creation. Norah looks for the origins of that myth, retracing her mother’s journey from touring Irish player to Hollywood and Broadway, before she returns to Ireland, the single mother of a baby girl.

More even than Katherine, Norah is elusive and fascinating. As she moves through her mother’s life story she is glimpsed at the margins, often seen but rarely present in the drama. There are only odd interruptions in the narration which hint at her present life and those around her.

Later, as she becomes an adult, Norah asserts herself, both in life and in her her account of her mother’s story. You sense that Norah is looking for herself as much as Katherine in the telling.

But who is she telling? There’s an old copywriting saw – ‘Who’s it from, who’s it to?’ This question of narration is artfully applied here. Who is the Norah who is telling this story? Daughter, reporter, biographer, critic? And who is she speaking to? There is a ‘you’ who appears from time to time in the narration. At first, it is ostensibly her husband, but it shifts throughout the book before returning to him. It is also the writers and researchers who contact Norah periodically, wanting stories to support their own theses. It is her fans, it is the unknowable future reader, the world.

The story brings in a number of fictional and real people from the period. It highlights the way artists are both of their time and place, and outside the norms, in its account of the tight-knit world of Irish media, arts and politics during Katherine’s life. Key events in Ireland’s recent history impinge on Katherine and Norah’s stories, from the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, to the bombing of Dublin and potential British involvement, to the paucity of contraception.

Norah the narrator seems incredibly clear-eyed about fame and its limitations, and this extends to her own memories, but of course there is that ambiguity there – is Norah mythologising her own past? Is Norah the character in the story as carefully crafted as Katherine O’Dell, Irish actress?

My one reservation about the book, which I’ve felt with all the Anne Enright novels I’ve read, is that I get to the end without any clear sense of resolution, of a story with an arc. There are two key elements in Actress – one around the theme of sexual violence, and another which defines the latter part of Katherine’s life – which should be dramatic but somehow feel like just more events. I also felt that the #MeToo element of the story felt a little too neat and not fully embedded in the novel.

Does that matter? Probably not. Enright’s prose is gorgeous, crackling with energy and dry wit. The sense of period and place are wonderful. The elusive but distinctive voice of Norah, the way she both debunks and re-energises the Irishness of the story, are wonderful.

What I particularly like about the mother-daughter relationship is that it defies the tropes of the Hollywood story. Norah’s description of her mother is neither a Mommie Dearest-style unmasking nor a hagiography. There is a sense of great affection between mother and daughter, a feeling of words that are never spoken, but at the same time a complicity, as if they recognise that the whole construct of fame is just an elaborate game which they both choose to play.

Then there is the tenderness with which Norah talks about her marriage and how love and passion can endure in a long-term relationship. Her husband, who is both barely present and central to the narrative, is the key to Norah’s sense of a life which is stable and calm and outwardly ordinary, but infused with true happiness and a profound connection which is quite different from the adoration that a fan feels for a star. Just as an author writes for everyone, no one and their first reader, you sense that her husband is the first listener at the heart of Norah’s life.

In Actress, Enright tells stories within stories about the complicated relationship between the performance that is life and the truth which is art.
*
I received a copy of Actress from the publisher via Netgalley.

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She Treads Softly

Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2020

Format: Kindle Edition

Actress by Anne Enright is a highly recommended treatise displaying the love of a daughter for her legendary mother.

Norah, the daughter of renowned Irish actress Katherine O’Dell, tells the story of her mother's life and, thus, her own life. As the novel turns to a biographical style, Norah begins to recount her mother's upbringing and career while she examines the secrets both women have held. Her mother was not Irish at all, as she was born in London, and the apostrophe in her name was originally a typo. Norah retraces the complexities of her mother's life and her own life. Readers know the end result: Katherine's slipping grip on reality and a well-publicized, sense-less criminal act when she shoots a producer in the foot.

Ever present and at the forefront is Norah's love and support for her mother, even as she reveals the secrets both women have held. Norah's chronicle of Katherine's life also highlights her own search for love and family. The end result is a revealed commonality of experiences between mother and daughter that almost all women can share, one of sexual violations and abuses. But the biggest well-kept secret is the identity of Nora's father. At the same time Norah is writing about her husband and how close but precarious their relationship seems at times.

The writing is beautifully done in a stream-of-consciousness style, which makes sense because this is Norah reminiscing. The reader is in her head and she is narrating the story of her mother and her life to a changing third person - the reader, or a writer who came around, or her husband. It accurately depicts a person's thought patterns when telling their story in their head; the recipient differs based on where you are at in the recollections. The emotional impact is in the insights Norah shares and the observations she makes.

If you are looking for a linear plot to follow, disappointment will occur with Actress. The plot meanders and jumps around in time and subject matter due to the style in which Enright has chosen to write the novel. If you can embrace the idea of being inside a daughter's head as she tells the story, following along will be easier. Lives aren't usually a culmination of a huge event, but rather the many small events of varying consequence. We know almost from the start that Katherine's life will have a big event, and the journey is in finding out her backstory via her daughter's point-of-view. The result is a tender, honest, exquisite depiction of both a mother and daughter that is complex yet unfinished.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of W.W. Norton & Company

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Top international reviews

terence dooley

disappointing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 26, 2020

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

A disappointing book from a marvellous writer. To the extent that this novel seems like a cross between a misery memoir and a film-star biography, 2 of my least favourite genres, I was probably not the ideal reader. Of course it is Anne Enright so there are flashes of harsh humorous genius and a brilliant evocation of '70s Ireland and nasty men on the fringe of the arts, but it was all a little impersonal and schematic, even po-faced, and the stuff of another 1000 books.

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Fly Me to the Moon

Fantastic book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 4, 2020

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

Beautifully written with a deadly story at its core.
Thought-provoking and heart-wrenching. How women are so often sidelined and relentlessly exploited and particularly creative women always reduced, scorned, trivilised.
Brilliant.

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Book Worm

Almost Captivating

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 3, 2020

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

The novel is beautifully written, with such a vivid portrait of Irish theatre and Hollywood. The actress and her daughter are well captured, but despite this, I feel the novel drifted to an end. It seemed too long, and perhaps at times a rambling that should have ended sooner.

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