Anne Enright’s Literary Journeys to Australia and New Zealand
Not long ago, the Irish writer Anne Enright visited Australia and New Zealand. When asking for a local recommendation at the Potts Point Bookshop, in Sydney, she was encouraged to pick up Charlotte Wood’s novel “Stone Yard Devotional.” “That was a very good steer,” Enright said. She loved the book and soon struck up a correspondence with Wood, who went on to send her a box of fiction from that part of the world. Enright has since spent time catching up on books that she suspects may have been overlooked because of their authors’ distance from the centers of literary influence. “Reading is about elsewhere, and about elsewhere coming back to you and illuminating your life in some way,” she said. She joined us recently to discuss a few favorite discoveries. Her remarks have been edited and condensed.
Monkey Grip
by Helen Garner
As soon as I got back from Australia, I read the reissues of the Helen Garner books that came out in the U.K. preceding the publication of her collected diaries. I started “Monkey Grip” not expecting to love it, because “The Children’s Bach” is the one that people go on about. But I didn’t want to put it down.
The book is about a woman, Nora, who is a single mother living in a communal house in Melbourne, as Garner did. And she is in erotic thrall to a guy named Javo, a heroin addict. The question of this book is, Is there no epiphany? Or is it all epiphany? There’s a wonderful sense of a kind of transparency of the world. The way the story progresses, it doesn’t really resolve, it doesn’t tie up the ends, but you get a real sense of someone coming through experience and being changed by it. It’s so fresh with insight and full of felt experience. And it’s written in such beautiful, supple, gleaming prose. It’s simple and clear and emotionally unafraid—it has the ability to express feeling without being mawkish or fuzzy in any way.
The Forrests
by Emily Perkins
This is a novel about two sisters, Dorothy and Evelyn Forrest. They have these feckless American parents who have some kind of family money for a while, which runs out. They go to live on a commune briefly, and then they settle in New Zealand.
The style is extraordinarily present and alive. “The Forrests” is just good old-fashioned literary fiction, and I’m kind of nostalgic for that. Perkins is particularly brilliant on domestic moments, including the daily wrangle that is raising small children. As in “Monkey Grip,” there is a beautiful guy who is the wrong guy, and both sisters love him. Most of it is focussed on Dorothy’s life, following her from an early age. In the last chapters, Dorothy has dementia and is approaching death, and the images of her life make sense to her—they kind of cohere into a story at the end.
It reminded me a little bit of Carol Shields’s “The Stone Diaries,” in the way that the story just goes through a life. There’s some integrity to that, I think. Normally, I hate when writers kill characters off. But this time it feels right. The book is about span, about love, about love that doesn’t go away. Anyone who’s been in an old folks’ home talking to someone who’s talking to their long-dead mother will recognize that, at the end, Dorothy has a cast of characters with her, and that that’s what the book has been about.
The Golden Age
by Joan London
The polio epidemic and T.B., as fictional subjects, are both really interesting to me, because stories about them are often about people in hospitals, and are focussed on the drama of being outside of things. That is intensified in this book, because the characters include Hungarian Jews who have been brought to Australia after the Second World War—people who have already been displaced.
“The Golden Age” is set in Perth in the nineteen-fifties. It’s a love story about two adolescents, Frank and Elsa, falling in love in a polio hospital. I don’t know if it’s just that I’m getting sentimental in my old age, but it’s very nice to read about characters for whom there are people they meet in early life whose importance is hard to describe, and does not go away.
Frank and his parents went through everything in the war. When the family arrives in Perth, there’s this amazing sense of space, and sometimes of excitement. You just know that the sky is a bigger, stranger, bluer sky than the European one. But the parents are damaged by what they’ve been through, and, though they are in a new place, don’t really dare to hope—and then Frank, who is their only child, gets polio.
The book has a really wise sensibility. It’s generous without being over the top. I sometimes think that the colder side of literature stops at trauma, or circles inside trauma, whereas these books are about coming through. Frank and Elsa go through an immense amount of painful physiotherapy, and you see them start to walk, go home, and begin to make their own lives again. It’s a very hopeful book set in extremely difficult times, and I loved it.
