![]() "Who would have thought love could be so expensive?. The cost of adultery is not in shame or guilt, as it might once have been in Ireland, but in house-sales. She belongs to a boom-town that defines itself in terms of property, "when if you wanted your kitchen tiled (and we wanted little else), you had to fly the workman in from England, and put him up in a hotel". They measure out their lives in large glasses of imported wine: there's the phase of being "mad into chardonnay", the "sauvignon blanc" years of happy marriage, alsace riesling as a spur to adultery, cracking open a "Loire white" as a reaction to bereavement.Įven the narrator, Gina Moynihan, who stands edge-on to this world, and derides her status-conscious sister for minding that the woman three doors down at Brittas Bay has wooden blinds on her mobile-home windows, nourishes her own "Sunday-supplement dreams". They host New Year's Day brunches in Issey Miyake pleats, their solicitors wear Alexander McQueen shoes, their love-affairs are kept going through texts and meetings in airport hotels and presents of Hermès scarves. They work in IT and consultancy and have beach houses and barbecues, they go wind-surfing and hold parties for "a guy who was taking a year out to be with his yacht". This is Ireland in the late 2000s, and Enright's people in this novel are consumers and communicators, businesswomen, property owners, Dublin suburbanites. We're worlds and generations away from the risky, convention-defying sexual adventures of Edna O'Brien's isolated girls, the violent repressions of country people in a McGahern story, or the quiet, hopeless longing of William Trevor's small-town lovers. However, the context, and the object, of this sentimental intensity, is as unromantic as you can imagine. And that is as much as any of us can know." Each chapter is headed by the title of a tear-jerking pop song ("Will You Love Me Tomorrow" "Stop! In the Name of Love" "Save the Last Dance For Me"), and the woman who tells the story has to keep telling us how deeply in love she is: "This is what puts me beyond regret – the sweetness of my want for him, the sense of something unutterable at the heart of it." "By Mullingar I thought, if I did not see him soon again, that I would surely die." "We want to hold on to the knowledge that comes when we look into each other's eyes." "I love him. The Forgotten Waltz, as its romantic title suggests, has more of a soft centre than she usually allows herself. ![]() ![]() The hardened, suffering speakers in her recent fine story collection, Taking Pictures, use this tone the grim damage of her Booker-winning The Gathering is energised by all that darkly comic unflinchingness. It's the nearest thing to magic I have yet found." That's the Anne Enright voice all right – wry, disabused, reckless, candid, funny. That all you have to do is sleep with somebody and get caught and you never have to see your in-laws again.
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