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Summary
Summary
Katherine O'Dell is an Irish theater legend. As her daughter, Norah, retraces her mother's celebrated career and bohemian life, she delves into long-kept secrets, both her mother's and her own. Katherine began her career on Ireland's bus-and-truck circuit before making it to London's West End, Broadway, and finally Hollywood. Every moment of her life is a performance, with young Norah standing in the wings. But the mother-daughter romance cannot survive Katherine's past or the world's damage. With age, alcohol, and dimming stardom, Katherine's grip on reality grows fitful. Fueled by a proud and long-simmering rage, she commits a bizarre crime.
As Norah's role gradually changes to Katherine's protector, caregiver, and finally legacy-keeper, she revisits her mother's life of fiercely kept secrets; and Norah reveals in turn the secrets of her own sexual and emotional coming-of-age story. Her narrative is shaped by three braided searches--for her father's identity; for her mother's motive in donning a Chanel suit one morning and shooting a TV producer in the foot; and her own search for a husband, family, and work she loves.
Bringing to life two generations of women with difficult sexual histories, both assaulted and silenced, both finding--or failing to find--their powers of recovery, Actress touches a raw and timely nerve. With virtuosic storytelling and in prose at turns lyrical and knife-sharp, Enright takes readers to the heart of the maddening yet tender love that binds a mother and daughter.
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
This evocative, incisive tale from Man Booker--winner Enright (The Gathering) turns a gimlet eye on the complicated relationship between a famous mother and her only daughter. Actor Katherine O'Dell is known throughout Ireland in the 1970s and '80s; she is also a loving--if distracted and sometimes absent--single mother to Norah, who's often left in the care of her nanny. Norah, who narrates, recounts mainly through flashback Katherine's star rising from humble beginnings in a traveling Irish theater troupe to her peak in Hollywood, where she increasingly struggles with alcoholism and depression. As Katherine enters her 50s, it largely falls to Norah to care for her mother, but when Katherine is committed to a mental hospital after shooting a movie producer in the foot, Norah finds professional help to care for her mother, as Norah marries, has children, and pursues her writing career. Enright portrays her characters with tenderness and grace ("It took me no time to adjust after she came home from hospital. And I don't know what I loved, as I tended her fragile bones, but I thought I loved my mother. Because she was always the same person for me"), depicting a fraught mother-daughter relationship without cliché or condescension. Enright's fans will love this sharp, moving work. (Mar.)
Guardian Review
Anne Enright's new novel opens with a question: "People ask me, 'What was she like?' and I try to figure out if they mean as a normal person: what was she like in her slippers, eating toast and marmalade, or what was she like as a mother, or what she was like as an actress - we did not use the word star." The actress is Katherine O'Dell and her daughter, Norah, tells her mother's story, intertwined with her own. There is another question: why did Katherine go mad? The people who ask, Enright imagines, are fearful: "as though their own mother might turn overnight, like a bottle of milk left out of the fridge". She reminds us that remembering a mother has its limitations - there will always be a vanishing point beyond which the rest is guesswork. And O'Dell's story may be further complicated by the possibility that she was at her most real on stage. What lies ahead is the best novel involving theatre since Angela Carter's Wise Children, although this is a more ambiguous love letter to the theatre than Carter's ebullient book. Enright was born in Dublin and her roots are partly theatrical (she even worked, for six months, as a professional actor). The Gathering, the masterly novel that won the Booker in 2007, had a comfortless power - could, at a stretch, be seen as a salute to Beckett. Actress is by no means light reading, but its desolations are offset by diverting writing, garnished with hope. Motherhood is a subject Enright has written about before, exploring its joy and tyranny in her nonfictional Making Babies (2004). But it is through fiction that life's limitations are lifted and the buoyant idiosyncrasy of her style is allowed to flourish most freely. The wonderfully offbeat detail about the mother going off like milk left out of the fridge is typical (an extra prop in the opening paragraph's imagined breakfast). Norah recalls her mother's house in Dublin, furnished from discarded stage sets: "you were always sitting in character, you were just not sure which one." She frequently returns to the subject of Irishness, not least because her mother capitalised on her Irishness but was actually born in London. At one point, Norah notes: "Dubliners talk to each other very easily. We talk as though getting back to it, after some interruption." Perhaps this explains something about Enright's prose: its trusting fluency, momentum, lack of aloofness. But having the gift of the gab can also be a cover: there are subjects about which Katherine will never speak. Norah has no idea who her father was. Nor can she resolve another mystery: her mother's shooting of a film-maker, Boyd O'Neill, in the foot. O'Dell's personal life is stranger than theatre: it is ironic that she should star in what would make a lousy scene in a movie and that the man she shot develops screenplays, a job about which he is gung-ho: "on some level, you were just throwing spaghetti against the wall, to see which strand would stick"." The many strands in this novel all stick. What's more, you have to keep reminding yourself that each one is fictional. In a particularly realistic scene, a journalist, Holly Devane, interviews Norah after her mother's death. Katherine died at 58 and Norah is now her mother's age. Norah notes the young interviewer's "flourishing intelligence that ran so close to stupidity". Devane has concocted an intrusive theory about Katherine's sexuality. Little does she know what either mother or daughter has suffered - sexual trauma about which we will eventually learn, but which is not about to find its way into any magazine article. This novel achieves what no real actor's memoir could. There is an understanding about not understanding what makes a great actor (although Norah touches on the stillness at the heart of some great performances). The daughter writes as a sage non-star but, before long, youth emerges as the great upstager. The passages that describe Norah's life seem blessedly free compared with those about her mother. Enright triumphs as a chameleon: memoirist, journalist, critic, daughter - her emotional intelligence knows no bounds. This is a study of possession that includes the subtly implied pain of having to share your mother with a crowd and of being obliged to admire her from afar. If, towards the end, the novel runs away with itself (the scene in which a hare is buried at an Irish television centre lost me), it is always at the service of life's jumbled truths. A sea view in Bray, outside Dublin, proves to be as good a pausing place as any and Enright is to be congratulated on not seeking to tidy up life for show, in allowing loose ends to be themselves.
Kirkus Review
A daughter reveals the intertwined tales of her mothera theatrical legendand herself, a mature retrospective of sharing life with a towering but troubled figure.Katherine O'Dell, star of stage and screen, blessed with beauty, red hair, and a gorgeous voice, "the most Irish actress in the world," was not Irish at all. She was born in London, and the apostrophe in her name crept in by error via a review following one of her appearances on Broadway. However, the fact that Katherine is "a great fake" doesn't cloud the love her daughter, Norah, has for her, a bond which exists alongside the unanswered question of Norah's father's identity, "the ghost in my blood." The complexities of this mother/daughter relationship and its context in Ireland, the men it includes, and the turns both women's lives take through the decades are the meat of this tender, possessive, searching new novel from Man Booker Prize-winning Irish novelist Enright (The Green Road, 2015, etc.). Saga-esque, it traces Katherine back to her parents, strolling players from another era who invited her on stage at age 10, scarcely imagining the luminous, internationally recognized figure this "useful girl" would become. But the novel is no fairy tale. Katherine's life was marked with loneliness; disappointing, sometimes exploitative, and abusive men; the pressure of trying to remain successful; a desperate act of violence; and a breakdown. Norah narrates both her mother's life and her ownshe's the author of five novels, a mother, a sexual being, and also the sole offspring of a parent she both adored and observed at a distance. Fame, sexuality, and the Irish influence suffuse the story, which ranges from glamour to tragedy, a portrait of "anguish, madness, and sorrow" haunted by a late, explanatory glimpse of horror which nevertheless concludes in a place of profound love and peace.Another triumph for Enright: a confluence of lyrical prose, immediacy, warmth, and emotional insight. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Norah recalls the behind-the-fame life of her mother, the mesmerizing star of the stage in Dublin, Broadway, and London, and of the silver screen in Hollywood, Katherine O'Dell. A quarter century after her mother's death, 59-year-old Norah, a fatherless child, is ready to look back, hoping, at last, to understand her mother and herself. The iconic glamour, the sordid truth--the drinking, smoking, drugs, and plagues of insecurity--and the crushing physical and mental toll exacted by her mother's alchemical talent are all here. Enright's indelible images of the primal love between mother and daughter that ebbs, flows, and ultimately abides will stick with readers. Not knowing who her father is, which is her mother's greatest secret, leads a twentysomething Norah to a devastating choice. Chillingly, she discovers a mirrored experience in a long-forgotten diary that contains her mother's distraught account of an assault--the day Norah was conceived--and the sustenance she found in faith. Enright (The Green Road, 2015) portrays her characters in precise, vivid detail and composes their interior architecture with inspired insight into all of humanity. In this powerfully poetic, psychologically and philosophically astute, and ultimately uplifting novel, the difficulty of truly knowing someone, even your own self, given the tricks of remembering and misremembering, is a dominant theme. The ups and downs of the artist's life, the dynamic between those who create and those who can't, the cost of fame, and the timely topic of how two generations of women confront, in different ways, the imperious power of men add to the depth and brilliance of this artful work.
