Anne Enright’s puzzling new novel is a counterblast against reductive thinking that struggles to offer a satisfying rival vision. The narrator, Norah FitzMaurice, a middle-aged novelist, believes that her late mother, the actress Katherine O’Dell, has been consistently misrepresented. Like Cecilia Brady, the “producer’s daughter” in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, who says that people either take Hollywood for granted or treat it with contempt, Norah is careful to identify a pair of pitfalls – the laziness of journalism and the arrogance of cultural history.
The old newspaper clippings about Katherine are “unreadable”. A press shot of mother and (a misnamed) daughter at Norah’s 21st birthday party is “such a fake”. Meanwhile, 30 years after Katherine’s death, the specialists turn up at her house, take notes, and then “write something enormously wrong-headed”.
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