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Summary
Summary
Nell McDaragh never knew her grandfather, the celebrated Irish poet Phil McDaragh. But his love poems seem to speak directly to her. Restless and wryly self-assured, at twenty-two Nell leaves her mother Carmel's orderly home to find her own voice as a writer (mostly online, ghost-blogging for an influencer) and to live a poetical life. As she chases obsessive love, damage, and transcendence, in Dublin and beyond, her grandfather's poetry seems to guide her home.
Nell's mother, Carmel McDaragh, knows the magic of her Daddo's poetry too well--the kind of magic that makes women in their nighties slip outside for a kiss and then elope, as her mother Terry had done. In his poems to Carmel, Phil envisions his daughter as a bright-eyed wren ascending in escape from his hand. But it is Phil who departs, abandoning his wife and two young daughters. Carmel struggles to reconcile "the poet" with the father whose desertion scars her life, along with that of her fiercely dutiful sister and their gentle, cancer-ridden mother. To distance herself from this betrayal, Carmel turns inward, raising Nell, her daughter, and one trusted love, alone.
The Wren, the Wren brings to life three generations of McDaragh women who must contend with inheritances--of poetic wonder and of abandonment by a man who is lauded in public and carelessly selfish at home. Their other, stronger inheritance is a sustaining love that is "more than a strand of DNA, but a rope thrown from the past, a fat twisted rope, full of blood." In sharp prose studded with crystalline poetry, Anne Enright masterfully braids a family story of longing, betrayal, and hope.
Author Notes
Anne Teresa Enright (born 11 October 1962) is an Irish author. She received an English and philosophy degree from Trinity College, Dublin. Enright is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; her novel The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. She has also won the 1991 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the 2001 Encore Award and the 2008 Irish Novel of the Year. Enright's writings have appeared in several magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, the London Review of Books, The Dublin Review and the Irish Times. In 2015 she made the New Zealand Best Seller List with her title The Green Road. This title also made the Costa Book Award 2015 shortlist in the UK. It also won the Irish Book Award for Novel of the Year.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Sept.)
Guardian Review
Anne Enright is one of our acutest chroniclers of relational complexity, whether she's skewering filial pieties in The Wig My Father Wore (1995), staging a tragicomedy of intergenerational fallout in the Booker-winning The Gathering (2007), or unpicking the cliche of motherhood in her essay collection Making Babies (2004). In her eighth novel, Enright again gives us a portrait of a uniquely unhappy family. Intimate and ambiguous, refusing to settle anywhere for long, The Wren, The Wren is told in three voices. There's middle-aged Carmel, recalling her childhood on the outskirts of Dublin with her ailing mother, resentful older sister and womanising father. There's Carmel's free-spirited daughter Nell, who is trying to escape the intensity of their bond but only succeeds in swapping it for a far riskier one with an abusive lover; and finally, there is Carmel's father himself, the poet Phil McDaragh, garrulous, seductive, pathologically self-regarding; the fount and origin of most of this dysfunction. Phil is a ferocious sendup of the Famous Irish Poet. Tweed-clad, "full of fake modesty and feigned sorrow", he's "a big fan of the working man", yet he leaves his wife and children to fend for themselves while he runs off to pursue a literary life in America. Decades later they are still getting over this betrayal. Examples of his verses - Heaneyesque lyrics about Irish fauna and flora - are scattered through the novel. These have all the sincerity of achieved art, but like Phil, their tenderness is an illusion. The most tender of all is a poem called The Wren, The Wren. Dedicated to Carmel, the daughter Phil abandoned, it gestures at her birdlike vulnerability and his own "earthbound heart" - now "of her love's weight / relieved". On Carmel's 16th birthday, philandering Phil sends her a letter urging her to turn her "infinite gaze to the masters of the Uffizi". The consolations of art, indeed. Years later Carmel finds a video of an interview with the dodgy old aesthete and suddenly recognises his dangerous "doubleness": "This is not just fake, I think. It's an actual trap." But it's Nell, Carmel's daughter, who is truly, terrifyingly trapped by illusion. Of the three voices in The Wren, The Wren, hers is the least substantial and in many ways the most disturbing. In a bid to put some distance between herself and her mother's possessiveness, Nell moves into a borrowed house on the other side of Dublin where she writes pieces for a travel website about places she has never visited and "poetry on pieces of paper, because I thought that using real paper meant they were real poems". Soon she has fallen in love, or thinks she has, with another illusion: wholesome-looking Felim, a muscly country boy with a taste for sadistic sex. Line for line, no one is more skilled than Enright at unfolding an unsettling scene After some choking and forced fellatio, Nell finds it "hard to tell the difference between sex and getting hurt in other ways". If you believe in generational trauma, then the pattern here is clear. Though another of Phil's poems, Inheritance, reflects cleverly on "The price of love lost / Or gained", his real legacy to Nell is her openness to this "adventure in abjection". This storyline appears to be building up to catastrophe, only to resolve itself, mercifully if a little bathetically, in a kooky travelogue. A real traveller in Italy at last, Nell treats us to generation Z's thoughts on Renaissance painting: "Many of the hundreds of penises in the Uffizi are very small and also anatomically incorrect." Take that, Phil and Felim. Art as an illusion, love as a trap, the stranglehold of family ties: these are themes that Enright has already made her own. They are not just reprised here but honed to an essential honesty. Line for line, no one is more skilled than Enright at unfolding an unsettling scene. She is particularly good at depicting female rage. In a brutal passage, Carmel attacks Nell for having broken a kitchen light. Nell has done this deliberately, by throwing oranges at the bulb: So Carmel reached into the bowl and threw one after another orange at Nell's legs, and that seemed to work, after which they were gone and Carmel threw the empty bowl which bounced off Nell's back and hit the floor, smashing there, so that Nell was stepping and dancing in the shards, which certainly did not bother her mother, who had been through a lot worse, a hell of a lot worse, than a stupid broken bowl. "You think that's bad?" she said. "You think that's bad?" In Enright's novels violence is never heroic, though it's often clarifying. Again and again, the real action is between women. As adults, Carmel and her sister Imelda act out the antagonism bred by years of fighting for their parents' love by slamming each other around their childhood home: "A little hugff of air came out of Imelda as she hit the wall and Carmel shifted into a brighter place ¿ It was as though her skull were filled with light." The Wren, The Wren is ruthless, raw stuff, both less calculated and more illuminating than anything Phil McDaragh could have written.
Kirkus Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
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.
