BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Green Road’

OPINION:

THE GREEN ROAD

By Anne Enright

Norton, $26.95, 310 pages

Sitting in the family home, writing Christmas cards to her four children, Rosaleen Madigan “caught the sound of mischief upstairs and looked to the ceiling. But there were no more children up there any more, she had chased them all away.”

That’s the plot, such as it is, of “The Green Road,” Anne Enright’s brilliant new novel. In the beginning, all four of Rosaleen’s children went away from her. In the end, they all came back, or at least tried to, hoping to make better sense of her life and their own. They were not totally successful, which should come as  no great surprise, this being, don’t you know, a novel by an Irish writer about an Irish family.

We meet the family Madigan in 1980 in their little house in their little town in County Clare. Rosaleen Considine Madigan and her husband Dan have two girls and two boys. First is Constance, then Dan, then Emmett and the baby Hanna. Each will grow up to be someone very different than their mother — and probably they — expected or wanted.

Life is not brutal on Ireland’s Atlantic coast, but it is hard. Birth control is still illegal, and the Celtic Tiger has yet to come and go. But life in the Madigan household is made more difficult as each child sees his or her dreams fade and die like the bubbles in the song.

Constance wants to be a chemist, a pharmacist, but fails the exam repeatedly and settles for marriage with a well-off man she likes more than loves. Dan leaves to become a priest (at the news, his mother wails in protest and takes to her bed), but it doesn’t stick and he moves to New York City where he discovers, at the height of the AIDS crisis, that he’s gay. Emmett wants to save mankind and begins in Mali, with very-less-than-positive results. And Hanna, a promising actress, leaves the theater thanks to an unplanned pregnancy, and it’s hard to tell which one likes her bottle more, Hanna or the child.

Rosaleen has summoned her now-adult offspring home at Christmastime to announce she is going to sell the family home, and in no time at all the old family patterns reappear. The author says a great deal by making a complete paragraph out of Constance commenting about her mother, “There was no pleasing her.” By this point, the reader, more than familiar with Madigan familial dynamics, gets the significance.

The sturm und drang of these people, both individually and collectively, drives the novel, but Ms. Enright characteristically fills the pages with rare insights into human nature, leavened with large drops of dark humor. She’s the kind of writer who makes the reader pull up short and notice what he or she has just read.

For example, early on, she has a young Hanna observe, of an uncle, “Bart had a perfectly useless wife. She had no children and beautiful shoes in a range of colors, and each pair had its own matching bag.” Of a stray dog Emmett’s girl adopts, Ms. Enright tells us, “He barked every evening he called the sudden sunset, as though doubting the dawn.”

On page after page, the author offers up complex observations in the simplest of words. At one point, we’re told a character is “about as much use as a chocolate teapot,” and, later, that the father of Hanna’s baby is as neat and dependable as Hanna is not, to the point that “Living with him put Hanna semi-permanently in the wrong.”

Readers who come to Anne Enright for the first time will be more than amply rewarded for their discovery. Over the past quarter-century, she has displayed her talent in three books of short stories, one work of nonfiction, and five novels. “The Gathering,” her 2007 novel, won the prestigious Man Booker Prize. In addition, her last novel, “The Awakening,” brought her (the first) Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

Dublin native and resident Anne Enright is known as much for her prose as for her storytelling ability. She is one of those rare writers who can make the darkest human tale palatable, thanks to her humanity and also, in no small part, her excellent sense of humor.

But then she is Irish, after all. As she told The Paris Review: “I don’t write about Ireland so much as from Ireland. I am keenly aware of the Irish tradition and I’m very happy to take what I can from it, but it’s also quite important to push against it. We’re all helplessly local writers.”

• John Greenya is a Washington writer.