Book Review: The Wren, The Wren

A novel about fathers and mothers and daughters

This novel by Anne Enright follows the lives of a mother, Carmel, and her daughter, Nell. Carmel’s father is Phil McDaragh, a famous Irish love poet, nationally revered. Phil, however, abandoned his family after his wife and Carmel’s mother, Terry, fell ill with breast cancer.

And so we follow the lives of both of these women as they navigate the world with their trauma. We see how hurt passes through generational lines, but also how we try to preserve love, and hope. We see that as broken as we may seem, we are simply doing our best, considering all that was done to us.

These are undoubtedly messy waters. Layers and layers of life all sit on top of each other, at the same time. But Anne Enright navigates the storm perfectly. She is able to find the correct combination of words that describe her character’s feelings, perfectly. There were multiple times when I would see a scene being formed, an emotion bubbling up in Carmel, and I would think to myself ‘Now how is she going to convey this feeling to the reader? To me?’ I somewhat could sense the emotion deep down in my gut, the way you want to connect with the characters you are reading about. But those are all ill-defined blobs, with no real edges. It is a different task altogether to describe those emotions with sentences, on paper. Where when one word is chosen, burned onto the page with ink and intention, another cannot be used in its stead. You made your decision. You can’t go back.

Throughout the entire novel, Enright made no bad judgements. The way in which she could articulate such complex emotions and relationships made me realize why I enjoy good writing so much. The human experience is a complex one. What each of us go through is multi-dimensional and full of nuance. And to be able to convey that information, that feeling — to show, not just tell, that slice of Life, is the essence of honest storytelling.