From Library Journal
Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature (having published both a novel and a collection of short stories), Enright here explores the impact of a shattering decision on a seemingly ordinary family. Bert Delaney's wife is diagnosed with a brain tumor during her first pregnancy, and Bert must decide whose life takes precedence. When twins are delivered, he makes a second decision that will irrevocably alter the lives of both his daughters, sending them on divergent routes marked equally by dislocation and despair. Set in Dublin, New York, and London, the book is written in episodic chapters that hop among voices and across time and space, and it takes some effort to see how the different patchwork pieces come together to form a pattern and story. Although Enright writes simply and economically, her characters fail to engage the reader. An acquired taste for larger fiction collections only.
-DCaroline M. Hallsworth, Sudbury P.L., Ont.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Enright writes in the fine Irish tradition of comic portrayals of tragic situations. A mother dies in childbirth; the reader learns much later that twins were born. Maria lives a life that feels incomplete and unsatisfying. In a lover's possessions, she finds a picture of herself as a child but in a place she has never been, wearing clothes she has never had. Her twin, Rose, who was adopted, lives the same incomplete sort of life. Will they, can they, come together? Using brittle, surreal, and highly original language, Enright brings us inside her story and characters. All the inhabitants of this novel, not just the twins, are struggling with loneliness, milling about in lives based on incomplete truths, looking for a center. There is no smoothness to the events because of the quirky points of view and skewed world picture. Any truth to be found is in the humor, which comes across in spite of everything. The book is not easy to read but well worth the effort. Danise Hoover
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
From Kirkus Reviews
This Irish writer's American debut offers stunning images, though not enough story to make the evocative language truly resonant.In 1965 Dublin a baby is born and a mother dies. What follows is over 20 years of fractured narrative as the girl grows up, the widower remarries, and a shocking secret is revealed. Taking time off from pursuing her engineering degree to live in New York, 20-year-old Maria falls in love with a man with a past-perhaps her own past. Innocently rummaging through his things one day, Maria finds among his possessions a picture of herself as a young girl, wearing clothes she's never owned and standing among people she's never met. Soon the mystery is resolved: The baby who was born was actually twins whom their distraught father Berts carelessly separated, choosing Maria, while Marie, renamed Rose, is adopted by an English couple living in London. As Enright flip-flops between Maria and Rose, the two women, so emotionally similar, grow up, choosing different though often parallel paths. The novel's haunting, albeit distant prose shines when describing the sensations of their mother Anna, pregnant and dying of a brain tumor, as she puts ketchup in the sugar bowl, and to her ailing mind the "sound of a tap dripping smel[ls] of roses." But far too often the narrative keeps Maria and Rose at arm's length, and the digressive revelations about middle-aged adulterer Berts, his new wife Evelyn, and Anna speaking from beyond the grave only widen the distance between the reader and the twins' unnamed heartache. Slowly the two sisters inch towards each other, but the final reconciliation of twin strangers isn't enough to save the meandering plot.The story's structure is too loose to be compelling, but newcomer Enright's lyrical language bespeaks her talent -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
From the Inside Flap
Anne Enright is one of Ireland's most exciting new writers, a beguiling storyteller of warm humor and wry lyricism. Here she gives us her American debut, 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 beginning of What Are You Like? Berts, a new father, simultaneously struggles to love his baby daughter while 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 nonetheless against our fierce connections 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 you sister is a big loud boozy girl, then give her this book.'"--Colm Toibin
"A spry surrealist who challenges the world with extraordinary, lancing sentences...Enright captures something subterranean with a strange flick of her marvelous insight."--James Wood, The Guardian (London)
"What is Anne Enright like? Flann O'Brien, yes, Tristram Shandy, a little, or Jonathan Swift meeting Kurt Vonnegut.... She whispers from inside her characters' minds, describing confusion, and the half-realized state of things which pass before their eyes.... Writing that wants to be read out loud, encounters that hover on the edge of revelations, and an excitement that fiction was once supposed to deliver. What is a really good novel like? This, for a start."--Aisling Foster, The Times (London)
"An eloquent writer...dazzlingly funny.... For Enright the recognizable dimensions of time, speech, and thought...are fluid and interchangeable, while metaphors often become the things they stand for.... [A] very powerful story."--Penelope Fitzgerald, The London Review of Books
Anne Enright lives and works in Dublin. In the United Kingdom, she has also published one collection of stories, The Portable Virgin, and a previous novel, The Wig My Father Wore. She is also a broadcast journalist, presenting pieces for BBC Radio 4.
About the Author
Anne Teresa Enright FRSL is an Irish writer. She has published half a dozen novels, many short stories and a non-fiction work called Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, about her time spent in Dublin's maternity hospitals.
