Is there a story or novel about a husband and father who is a successful writer yet manages to maintain his roles as a husband and father?
Since I finished reading Anne Enright’s recent novel, “The Wren, The Wren”, contemplation has been on my head. The story tells the fictional account of Irish poet Phil McDaragh, who leaves his sick wife and two small daughters, a move that reverberates until the life of his granddaughter.
Although literary men are not all that are awry in the actual circumstances this cannot take away the evidence of fact that character always makes a more common story. It is very clear in “The Wren, The Wren” that even in the fragile title of the story, it can be displayed as an ironic and harsh story. The narrative proceeds further into the fallout left for the rest of us, when that particular ‘Grandmaster of Letters’ decided to the house.
After he dies, McDaragh even gets to be the first love poet of his time. This fact happens at a period preceding the #MeToo movement, an era when poet predators ramped wantonly along with conferences and classrooms. An about turn in his life occurs when Terry, his first wife is find with breast cancer and almost immediately, he shifts into a new relationship with an American coed whose breathtaking beauty has no rival and who eventually becomes his second wife.
Long after that, when the younger daughter of Phil, namely, Carmel tread onto the virtual world and found a TV clip with an interview of him in the 1980s, several years prior to his demise. In this interview, he thinks about his marriage with Terry: she lost her health… Sadly and the marriage could not stand up to it. Jaded, Carmel watch right through Phil’s tear-jerking show on the TV. At the same time we know that, after her father’s death, Carmel thinks inside her head “a room of her mind was engendered by earth”.
“The Wren, The Wren” is a novel that tells the story of each chapter through the eyes of a different character of the family. Though all character demands attention, it is her Nell the granddaughter of Terry and Phil and daughter of Carmel who holds the prominent position in this ensemble. In this phase of her life, Nell has an attitude that is bursting with vibrancy and possibilities. She immensely respects her grandfather’s magnificent poetry and throughout the novel Anne Enright artfully includes pertinent excerpts of this poetry. Nell is also creating her own road in the world of writing along with working for a travel site from Dublin where she writes online material.
In Nell’s story, she comments, “a year after graduating from college, I was dipping my nose and mustache into the adult world…. “And this happens at a nightclub, where a country boy Felim meets her. He takes her out, by having his arms around her holding her up in the air behind her. Though this strategy should logically draw warning signs, it takes a bit for the wise Nell to catch that Felim is a scoundrel. Looking back on this case, Nell admits:
“I realized that each of the insignificant things that I had said on that night we had spent together put a stamp on him and this mark has a negative connotation for him since now he recalls it as a reproach. He was not listening but he was retaining everything.”
However, the strength of Enright’s novel is not just in the old tale of men being bad but that its power is in the unique beauty and richness of her remarkable art. Enright skilfully weaves intriguing conclusions about different people and situations in her narratives. At one particularly suggestive point, we return to a scene where Carmel is a child at her own father’s funeral, listening to a fellow poet’s eulogy. Swaddled in dark borrowed tights, Carmel notices a strange sensation of tightening and throbbing, which is in essence a tick. The poet in a pretentious way describes Phil’s collections of poetry as “a poetical expression about a roaming human soul.” However, we are informed that:
In a sense, the poet created an illusion which suggested that Phil did not leave his family but he went on a journey for his art. Phil argued with Dante or Ovid, someone had to take up these assignments. If her father gave up poetry, something terrible would follow. Reality would be lifted from a veil.
In that passage, Enright contains the belief of a child’s blind love for a far away parent and the coming disappointment. “The Wren, The Wren” is sometimes referred to as the “little story,” reflecting on the emotional lives of women. However, Enright’s compelling writing leaves no doubt that these stories are never trivial when you get involved in them.
