I must admit there was something about this book that propelled me to complete it. Perhaps that something was Nell's restlessness and her search for romantic love and her grandfather, Phil, she only knows by his poetry.
The story is told from the perspectives of Nell and her mother, Carmel. Little by little Phil is revealed to reader and also to Nell.
We discover The Wren, The Wren was a poem penned by her deceased grandfather for her mother when she was just a child. We discover her grandfather believed in fairies and loved the Irish landscape. We discover another side to Phil, he deserted his first wife when she lost a breast to cancer and simultaneously his two young daughters then marries again.
I suppose this novel explores the means to which these women reconcile to the fact that Phil although a lover of nature and birds and fairies could also be a cold hearted sob. ( )

A thinly plotted , non-linear story. I do enjoy character driven novels, but these characters were not well realized, nor interesting, nor sympathetic. I did not find much to like about this book, and I was glad to finish the last page.

The story is narrated by Nell, a young woman, and her mother, Carmel , and briefly by Phil McDaragh, Carmel's now dead father, who was a somewhat famous poet in Ireland. A quote from Nell regarding her grandfather Phil , p.241 " My grandfather loved my grandmother so much you could not be in the same room with them, as they flamed in the presence of others"... " they both knew it could not last". This quote is taken from a poet named Harvey in a letter of condolence following Phil's death. This is a kind of love I don't understand. A love that flames, yet must die. I guess this explains why Phil was a philanderer and left his wife Terry while she was suffering with breast cancer.

When the novel opens, Nell is in an abusive relationship with a man named Felim. Felim likes to flip through images of porn while he has sex with Nell, and he snaps pictures with his phone of Nell having sex with him , and uploads this to the net. Nell thinks of this relationship, p129, " I was just a throwaway thing, not just for him, but for the people that paid me" etc. She wonders if she had a proper job, a proper place to live , would she have a proper relationship? But I ask myself , why are you in this relationship.

Nell's mother Carmel, wanted a child, but not a husband or any sort of long term relationship as a result of her father leaving her mother. There is some poetry peppered throughout the book, which I was unable to appreciate. I know for many this is a great read, but not for me.

2.5 stars. ( )

Reason read: shared read, TIOLI, best of 2023. This was a book that received some attention in 2023. I've read 2 previous books by Enright. This is my least favorite. It is about family and about trauma and I know that trauma is a difficult thing but this was just plain not my thing; it is too much about sex, too much about menstruation, too swearing and just not enough story. I did appreciate this line; "love is a higher function, sex is a beast". This is very true and probably the heart of the subject of this book. ( )

The Wren, The Wren is a slender book to cover three generations in Ireland, but that it does. The family we come to know begins with Phil McDaragh, a prize-winning Irish poet who wins fame and celebrity in his lifetime, but who abandons his family when his wife gets breast cancer. Carmel anchors the next generation while her sister labors in nursing and academia. Carmel spends her life alone, mostly by choice, with the exception of her only lasting love, her daughter. Carmel’s daughter Nell, like Phil, makes a career in writing, mostly as an influencer with a good following. All of them struggle with love, rejecting possibility again and again. In a way, it’s a story of one man wreaking damage down through the generations.

But Phil McDaragh offered more than damage. He loved Carmel and wrote to her and creating a poem to honor her. She wavers between love and hate for her father. She certainly cannot trust men so she never gives them a chance to hurt her deeply. Carmel loves her daughter Nell and is happy she needn’t share her with her father, an old lover who likely will never know he fathered Nell. Nell thinks of herself as socially awkward and she goes through a series of unsatisfying men, obsessing for a time about a cruel man. This all seems a repetition of behavior poisoning the generations but can she find a way home to a place she can love happily?

The Wren, The Wren is a beautiful book. Anne Enright writes with language that paint vivid pictures, but she’s not creating some Elysian field or glorious Otherworld. In fact, her writing is very much rooted in this world and its realities. For example, Carmel observes a beautiful zucchini flower, but what truly delights her is the how it looks as though the flower is excreting the zucchini. I love Carmel.

I read this book very slowly. When the story shifted from one character to another, I took a break. There were so many ideas I had to pause, read something else and come back after mulling on her ideas for a while. There was just so much to enjoy, like a rich and decadent chocolate torte. You cannot eat it all at once.

Some of her themes are quite simple, that empathy is how we bridge the spaces between us. Others quite complex, such as the idea that “the pain makes you feel accused of making pain up.” There is also an ongoing contrast between the urban life and the rural life in nature, sometimes only experienced in travel. The potential for rural life to be very brutal, suggested by Carmel’s visit to her lover’s family farm is driven home by the one chapter that focused on Patrick. It was brutal and violent. There is also familial violence between Carmel and her sister, Carmel and her daughter, and Patrick and the women in his life.

Nature is so present in the book, it’s like another character. The idea that all our names for things in nature miss the point, that the creature is itself and doesn’t need our name. Our observation of a bird does not change its birdly essence. Mostly she examined the central dilemmas of being human, love, sex, and family. It could be harrowing, but love endured.

Throughout the book there is poetry which we are to take as Patrick McDaragh’s poetry. They are very much focused on the land, the flowers, the birds, and the animals and, of course, on love. He wrote a poem for the important women in his life, though oddly, not for his American wife. Reading an essay Enright wrote for The Guardian, it seems some of McDaragh’s character was based on the Irish poet Patrick Kavanaugh. Of him and his relationship to women, she concluded their was “a faint creepiness.” Of Patrick McDaragh, there is always a faint creepiness, too.

Another theme running through the book was the sharp contrast between ugliness and beauty. She had no beautiful words for sex or its messy aftermath. It was often painful, disappointing, and demeaning. But the flowers, trees, the water of streams and oceans, and the birds were described with loving awe. The birds, there were always birds, another constant refrain throughout a book named for the wren.

The Wren, The Wren at W. W. Norton
Anne Enright at GoodReads (She posts essays and book recommendations.)

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2024/01/06/the-wren-the-wren-by-anne... ( )