Attention: Writing on Life, Art and the World <\/p>\n
Author: Anne Enright <\/p>\n
ISBN-13: 978-1787335776<\/p>\n
Publisher: Jonathan Cape<\/p>\n
Guideline Price: \u00a320<\/p>\n
The last essay in Attention begins in Venice. Anne Enright and her husband are on a cycling trip that will take them to Trieste and, from there, through Slovenia to the Croatian town of Pore\u010d. She notes wryly their state of unpreparedness: \u201cwe are not young and fit. These days the \u2018organ recital\u2019 is followed by the \u2018joint account\u2019 as we discuss shoulders, knees, vertebrae and hips. Our itinerary is too ambitious. It always is.\u201d By day five she is in pain everywhere but the reward is that \u201cthe pace of my bike is the pace of my noticing, and for half an hour at a time, I am in an ecstasy of attention\u201d. <\/p>\n
The essays in the collection capture some of that ecstasy in the admiration Enright professes for writers she particularly values such as Angela Carter, Edna O\u2019Brien<\/a>, Toni Morrison<\/a> and Helen Garner. But the pain evident in the forms of wrong done to women in the name of political and social propriety is also a constant. The \u201cattention\u201d in the book\u2019s title is both a comment and a warning: a comment on the expansive scope of Enright\u2019s curiosity \u2013 her paying attention to everything from the anatomical oddity of Irish male slang (how can you \u201ctalk\u201d shite) to Canadian preferences for patterned socks \u2013 and a warning to remain attentive to the multiple forms of silencing and exclusion that have blighted generations of women\u2019s lives in Ireland and beyond. Though most of the pieces have already been published elsewhere in magazines and newspapers, the publisher has done the reader a signal service by bringing the essays together under one cover if only to give a sense of the hinterland to the preoccupations that have shaped the fictions of one of Ireland\u2019s foremost contemporary writers. <\/p>\n Enright makes all her own Toni Morrison\u2019s crusade against \u201clump thinking\u201d, the tendency to resort to generalities and not deal with people, \u201cone by one\u201d, each as they appear. She is not afraid to ask difficult or awkward questions about writers she greatly admires. In a meticulously researched essay on Alice Munro<\/a>, she argues that the work of the Nobel Prize laureate needs now to be read in the light of the abuse of her daughter <\/a>by the child\u2019s stepfather. Enright\u2019s forensic intimacy with Munro\u2019s work allows her to examine the impact of withheld knowledge and patterns of denial in the working out of the Canadian author\u2019s later fictions. The critical alertness of Enright\u2019s mind is on compelling display in a piece that is written with both great tact and a clear sense of moral purpose.<\/p>\n [\u00a0Maeve Brennan, a writer who was at home in neither Ireland nor AmericaOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n The troubling intersection between art and life also surfaces in an essay on John McGahern, originally commissioned for a New York Review of Books edition of The Pornographer. Enright traces connections between McGahern\u2019s refusal for many years to meet his son and the novel\u2019s often clinical exploration of the consequences of an unwanted conception. This is not biography as a straightforward morality tale, however. Enright is more concerned with how the details of a life can illuminate particular fictional choices and writerly concerns that might otherwise seem puzzling. It is, again, her knowing and deep engagement with McGahern\u2019s work that lends force to her assessments. <\/p>\n Her admiration for Maeve Brennan, however, remains undiminished in an elegant tribute to the Irish writer who spent many years in New York and was largely ignored by Irish critics before the appearance of Angela Bourke\u2019s major biography in 2004. Enright is particularly drawn to Brennan\u2019s distinctiveness as an author who cultivated a recognisably urban voice: \u201cThe Irish oral tradition has a performative aspect that can tip a writer\u2019s persona into \u2018personality\u2019, but Brennan\u2019s characters had very little \u2018character\u2019 to speak of.\u201d It is the understated plausibility of these characters, populating Dublin\u2019s inner suburbs, that frees them from the tyranny of national type, from what Brennan herself called \u201cthe bog and thunder variety of stuff that has been foisted abroad in the name of Ireland\u201d. <\/p>\n