Family ties have always been a central focus of Anne Enrights probing, gorgeously written fiction, and her new novel examines two in eloquent detail: narrator Norah FitzMaurices fraught bond with her mother Katherine ODell, the eponymous actress; and Norahs tense but enduring marriage to a man we know only as you. As in such previous Enright novels as The Green Road and her 2007 Booker Prize winner, The Gathering, the characters personal dramas unfold within a sharply observed social context. Ambition and desire are tangled up with sexism and male violence in Actress, as Norahs account of her mothers career mingles with her own memories of childhood and of coming of age in Ireland during the Troubles, a period of sexual as well as political unrest.

People ask me, What was she like? These are Norahs first words to us, her readers, and they pose one of the novels defining questions, for Norah isnt sure she truly knew this woman who was always performing. Indeed, did Katherine know herself? A marvelous description of her signature curtain call (too richly detailed, alas, to quote) suggests that when she wasnt playing a part, Katherine did not exist, almost. The woman we first meet, in 1973 at Norahs 21st birthday party, is 45 and, in the eyes of the world, finished. Professionally, sexually. In those days, when a woman hit thirty she went home and shut the door. Katherines refusal to accept this judgment leads in 1980 to her shooting a Dublin film producer in the foot; he is crippled and she gets committed to a mental institution.

It takes time for Norah (and her readers) to make this connection, although she tells us about the shooting immediately after describing her birthday party, which introduces us to a predatory university professor whose significance will also become clear later. Actress progresses the way thought does, winding in and out of present and past on a journey towards understandingor maybe just acceptance. Norah is prodded into this journey in middle age, a quarter-century after her mothers death in 1986, by a visit from a graduate student writing a thesis intended to reclaim Katherine ODell as an agent in the worldin all her radical subjectivity. (Though the tone here is generally dark, Enright is bitingly funny about academic jargon and other forms of blather.)

Four hours later, Norah recalls, you said I should write the damn book myself. With those words, the second crucial relationship in Norahs life is introduced, and her husband (you) enters the narrative as a thorny character whose suggestion was made, she notes, in a tone of bottomless irritation, as though my failure to write the book was pretty much on par with my failure to stack the dishwasheryou were a martyr to my incompetence in this and other matters. We never learn his name, but as Norah investigates her mothers pastperhaps to shut him up?we do learn that the condescension and exploitation Katherine experienced as a rising star in America in the late 1940s and early 50s were still part of the male arsenal when Norah was typing articles for the magazine her husband-to-be and his pals launched at university in the 70s. Nonetheless, they are still married, and Enrights unflinching portrait of a couple that never made up our minds about anythingexcept each other is scrupulously developed and painfully moving.

Katherines sojourn in America followed her youth on the road, the daughter of strolling players whose itinerant theatrical milieu is lovingly recreated by Enright. In 1948, she came to America, to be remade by her agent into the quintessential Irishwoman, hair dyed red and dressed always in greenuntil she put on a habit for the career-making role as a lovestruck nun that took her to Hollywood. And it was in America that she got pregnant. After moving back to Ireland with her baby, Katherine gave varying accounts of the father Norah never knew, beginning with the romantic tale of a loving artist killed in a car crash and ending with the bleak statement, he does not have a name. Doesnt deserve one. The posthumous revelation that buttresses this claim is so outr in some of its particulars that its barely credible, but it serves as a capstone to Enrights stark depictions of sex as a power struggle in which men mostly have the upper hand.

But not always: Enright is too discerning an artist to make blanket assertions about human nature or human behavior, and her characters are too vibrant to be neatly categorized. Norah and her husband are equally capable of cruelty and infidelity; Katherine has been wronged, but she is no cringing victim. The social forces that that shape these lives are important, but there is an equally important inner imperative at work: Norahs effort to understand her mothers life, entwined with her effort to understand her marriage. In the end she comes to the same conclusion about each: love is difficult and inexplicable, never to be entirely plumbed, and enough to be getting on with.

Wendy Smith, a contributing editor at The American Scholar and Publishers Weekly, reviews books for The Washington Post and was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circles citation for excellence in reviewing.

ACTRESS

By Anne Enright

W. W. Norton, 264 pages, $26.95

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An unforgettable mother, a shared history of sexism, in 'Actress' - The Boston Globe