The picture on the front of this book is a fairly accurate representation of what you can expect from the writing inside. The tone is dark and carries the mental dust of difficult memories, and as I was reading, I just wanted someone to turn the lights on and open a window.
I pulled this off the New Books shelf in the library and a little way into the book I flipped back to the copyright page just to make sure this had actually been written recently, and sure enough, it was published in 2020. It just felt older somehow. Years back, I read and enjoyed The Gathering that won the Booker Prize for Enright in 2007, and the writing style in Actress carries much the same formality and intelligence, but even the pivotal moments in the plot are delivered without much enthusiasm.
The reader is given the story of Irish theatre legend, Katherine O'Dell, as told by her daughter Norah, and although Katherine experienced early stardom in Hollywood then went on to a successful stage career in Dublin and London, Norah recounts everything with a kind of brooding stillness that I found so flat that it was hard to concentrate. I wasn't bored exactly but what I felt was a close relation to bored. Maybe a first cousin.
In fairness to Anne Enright, Norah has had a lot to deal with as the daughter of a famous woman who has concealed a lot from her daughter, including the identity of her father, so perhaps the quiet tone is appropriate to the context. Maybe I shouldn't have read this in high summer when the sun caused the book to form a shadow on my day.
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