The forgotten waltz

Review by New York Times Review

In a snowy suburb of Dublin, Anne Enright's narrator recalls an adulterous affair during Ireland's financial boom. AS "The Forgotten Waltz" opens, a young married woman named Gina Moynihan is kissing an older man, Sean, upstairs in his house, when Gina realizes they are being observed by Sean's daughter, Evie. Sean's wife calls up to Evie to rejoin the party downstairs, and despite what she has just witnessed, the child, who has burst out laughing at the sight of her father and Gina embracing, seems reassured. This quick summary might lead some readers to suppose that Anne Enright's new novel offers an update on a subject - thwarted Irish adultery - that Edna O'Brien and William Trevor have written about with such tenderness and compassion. But these readers would be wrong. Because already an odd note in Gina's narrative voice hints that, despite the surface resemblances, the world she inhabits is fundamentally unlike that of Trevor and O'Brien, whose characters, however trapped by circumstance and led astray by passion, tend to be good at heart. But Gina doesn't seem to have a heart - or, for that matter, a conscience. Nor is she particularly intelligent, though she does work in "I.T., sort of" and has a sharp eye for designer dresses and shoes. She's less interested in the sad little home she's wrecking by sleeping with Sean or in the pain she's causing his "zombie" wife, Aileen, "whose little fat sits in sad, middle-aged pouches about her boy's body" and who wears "very middle-aged lipstick, pinkish and pearlized, on her unprepossessing, useful face." Annoyed and repulsed by Evie, whose neurological illness - a seizure disorder - is an understandable worry for her parents, Gina finds the child "slightly unbearable. . . . It might have been something to do with the fat" or "the wrong sort of face." She stifles the urge to call her a "little cow." Throughout, Gina's humor crackles with brittle desperation, and while you may share her impatience with, let's say, overprotective middle-class parents (Gina's sister's children have never seen a cigarette) we want to distance ourselves from whatever she is thinking. Delighted that the end of her marriage to the hapless Conor has rescued her from having to visit his boring family, she crows: "I just can't believe it. That all you have to do is sleep with somebody and get caught and you never have to see your in-laws again. Ever. Pfffft! Gone. It's the nearest thing to magic I have yet found." It's early in the new, still fiscally optimistic century, and Gina works at a company that "puts European companies on the English-language Web." The Irish economy is thriving, and Gina (like many others, we can assume, and not only in Ireland) has filled the hole where a soul might be with narcissism, acquisitiveness, competitiveness, a lively interest in the prices of things and, above all, with real estate hunger - for beachfront property, in particular. She resents the settled and middle-aged for having nice homes, and when her mother dies, Gina is briefly distracted from her grief (the most genuine and powerful emotion she feels in the book) when a lawyer suggests that she and her sister might get "two and a bit" for the sale of their mother's house. "If you're going to spin your grief into cash - what the hell - maybe it helps if the cash is crazy." Though Conor wants children, Gina is sensibly mindful of the cost: "How were we supposed to pay for it? The mortgage was two and a half grand a month, the child care would be another grand on top of that." In the novel's first sentence, Gina tells us that "the fact that a child was involved made everything that much harder to forgive." The point of this will not become clear until the strong final scene, when it turns out (trust me, this is not a spoiler) that Evie is the only major character with a basic sense of moral consequence. Until then Gina's concern with forgiveness is submerged by a tendency to blame her actions on alcohol and a certain fogginess that is, for her, a side-effect of the birth control pill. In fact Gina's foggy about a lot of things: how, why and when the critical events in her story take place. ("I can't be too bothered here, with chronology.") And she's hazy on details, preferring the fuzzy and general summary to the sharp and particular representation. Her job involves translation, but not from "the romance languages, unfortunately, I do the beer countries, not the wine." When a character tells us, as Gina does, that "languages are my thing," we're alerted to the probability that English is, alas, not one of them. Enright willfully exchanges the descriptive abilities she demonstrated in her previous novel, "The Gathering," winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize, for Gina's poppsychology clichés, vagueness and inexactitude. "We knew each other," she says of the early days of her marriage to Conor. "Our real life was in some shared head space; our bodies were just the places we used to play." Gina describes a friend's pregnant wife as "slow and hysterical as a turnip in a nervous breakdown." Enright gets credit for courage: she never allows Gina to step out of character, never signals from behind the mask of Gina's limitations to remind us she's smarter and nicer than her protagonist. But this also means Enright doesn't have to be more original or precise than Gina would be. Why spend days trying to find an exact or fresh way of describing erotic desire when her narrator wouldn't bother? "I felt - I still feel - that if we kissed again, we might never stop." Each chapter has a title suggestive of a romantic song, and it does make one wonder what "Madame Bovary" would have been like, narrated by an Emma whose brain had been softened (or, in Gina's case, hardened) not by romance novels but by "Sex. and the City." "The Forgotten Waltz" is a book we read with enjoyment and admiration but not for the usual pleasures of language, suspense, sensibility and so forth. Though the last half contains a few mild surprises, by that point we're not especially curious about what happens to Gina and Sean. For me, the suspense lay in seeing if Enright would weaken and allow her narrator to be redeemed by any of the emotions that are commonly believed (in fiction, if not always in life, as any estate lawyer will tell you) to be improving and redemptive. Ultimately, "The Forgotten Waltz" evokes Enright's Irish literary colleagues less than it does a tour de force like Ford Madox Ford's novel "The Good Soldier," a book whose narrator has only a partial and flawed idea of the story being told. "The Forgotten Waltz" is a nervy enterprise, an audacious bait-and-switch. Cloaked in a novel about a love affair is a ferocious indictment of the self-involved material girls our era has produced. Enright's channeling of Gina's interior monologue is so accurate and unsparing that reading her book is, at times, like eavesdropping on a very long, crazily intimate cellphone conversation. It's a testament to the unwavering fierceness of Enright's project that I mean this as high praise. We've all met people like the characters in her book. Neither evil nor good, they're merely awful in entirely ordinary ways. And it's impressive, how skillfully Anne Enright has gotten them on the page. Francine Prose's most recent book is a novel, "My New American Life." 'All you have to do is sleep with somebody and get caught and you never have to see your in-laws again.'

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 2, 2011]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Although the story of an affair is certainly not an uncommon theme in fiction, for the reader to be so engrossed in such a tale by the writing style alone is a less-common situation. But in fairness, in balance, this stunning novel by a Booker Prize winner (for The Gathering, 2007) also offers up its brilliance by way of astonishingly effective storytelling. The setting is the author's native Ireland, which, ironically, because of the immaculate presentation of story and character, almost doesn't matter. Gina is married, holds a professional business position, and is now recalling an obsessive, selfish, and problem-riddled affair with the equally married Sean. Enright suitably constructs her narrative to reflect the natural tendency of a person to remember events not necessarily in strict chronological order but in fits and starts and with backtracking and flash-forwarding, and only, eventually concluding at the end. The vicissitudes of extramarital love and the obstructions to its smooth flow including spouses, children, and the very clandestineness of the relationship are tracked by Enright with a raw clarity expressed in magnetically precise prose. The tension in the narrator's voice serves as the dramatic tension of the novel itself, irresistibly drawing the reader through these at-once gorgeous and ache-filled pages. . HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: In addition to the author's growing name recognition, her publisher has planned for her a nine-city U.S. tour and major review attention and library promotion.--Hooper, Bra. Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this gorgeous critique of Ireland as the Celtic Tiger draws its dying breaths, Enright chronicles an affair between 32-year-old Gina Moynihan, and Sean Vallely, a rich, dutiful husband and a devoted if somewhat inept father to the otherworldly, epileptic Evie, not yet 13. Set against a backdrop of easy money, second homes, and gratuitous spending, the dissolution of Gina's and Sean's marriages is both an antidote to and a symptom of the economic prosperity that gripped the country until its sudden and devastating fall from grace in 2008: "In Ireland, if you leave the house and there is a divorce, then you lose the house.... You have to sleep there to keep your claim.... You think it is about sex, and then you remember the money." There are, as with any affair, casualties, but what weighs most heavily on Gina is not what will become of her husband, Conor, but rather Evie, who sees Gina kissing her father, and innocently asks if she might be kissed too, oblivious to the fact that this moment heralds the end of her family. She eventually becomes all too aware that her father is gone and that she's stuck with her sad, neurotic mother. And so the question that remains at the end of this masterful and deeply satisfying novel is not just what will happen to Ireland, but what will happen to Evie? (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

She's a sharp-tongued home wrecker who doesn't try to ingratiate herself. But in this corrosively beautiful novel from Man Booker Prize winner Enright (The Gathering), you want to drag back Gina Moynihan as she recounts plunging headlong into the affair that will change her life. Gina met Sean Vallely at sister Fiona's house and first made love to him, without much pre-amble, while drunk at a business conference. Lectured by her sister, who proclaims that their just-deceased mother would have been mortified, Gina silently disagrees. Surely Mum would have appreciated this affair, which has liberated Gina from.what? The dread of domesticity with teddybearish but somewhat dense husband Conor? Boredom with a lock-step job in Ireland's grim economy? Writing with cool, clear-eyed logic, Enright is brave and persuasive enough to paint Sean as less than ideal; he's a rigid bully and not overwhelmingly attractive. Through Gina's determined pursuit of their relationship, we see the stupefying nature of desire, which Enright deftly contrasts with the sometimes equally stupefying nature of parenting; Gina's big competition is not Sean's wife but his sweet, not-quite-right daughter. VERDICT A breathtaking work that will surprise you; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 4/11/11.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

An adulterous love affair and Ireland's financial collapse overlap in the consistently impressive latest from the Man Booker Prize winner.Real estate, materialism and family ties form the background to the story of an intense physical liaison between Gina Moynihan and Sean Vallely, narrated by Gina in a voice simultaneously smart and cynical, wry and all too conscious of the impact of their actions. With exquisite perception, Enright (Yesterday's Weather,2008, etc.) lifts a conventional story of infidelity into a larger study of connection, catastrophe and anguish, leavened by dark humor. What begins as a casual, clandestine sequence of encounters in hotel rooms between two married individuals slowly gathers momentum and, as her mother dies and the property market implodes, Gina's drift away from the husband she has loved becomes complete. The lovers end up living in Gina's mother's old home, previously valued at "two and a bit" but now worth nothing as no one will buy. Not so much a love story, more a consideration of female bonds and choicesmen, work, childrenand the unruly depths of human emotions, Enright's book once again brings melancholy lyricism to a domestic scenario and lifts it into another dimension.In rueful, witty, unpredictable and compassionate prose, Enright gives expression to subtle, affecting shades of human interaction.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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I met him in my sister's garden in Enniskerry. That is where I saw him first. There was nothing fated about it, though I add in the late summer light and the view. I put him at the bottom of my sister's garden, in the afternoon, at the moment the day begins to turn. Half five maybe. It is half past five on a Wicklow summer Sunday when I see Seán for the first time. There he is, where the end of my sister's garden becomes uncertain. He is about to turn around -- but he doesn't know this yet. He is looking at the view and I am looking at him. The sun is low and lovely. He is standing where the hillside begins its slow run down to the coast, and the light is at his back, and it is just that time of day when all the colours come into their own.   It is some years ago now. The house is new and this is my sister's housewarming party, or first party, a few months after they moved in. The first thing they did was take down the wooden fence, to get their glimpse of the sea, so the back of the house sits like a missing tooth in the row of new homes, exposed to the easterly winds and to curious cows; a little stage set, for this afternoon, of happiness.     They have new neighbours in, and old pals, and me, with a few cases of wine and the barbecue they put on their wedding list but ended up buying themselves. It sits on the patio, a green thing with a swivelling bucket of a lid, and my brother-in-law Shay -- I think he even wore the apron -- waves wooden tongs over lamb steaks and chicken drumsticks, while cracking cans of beer, high in the air, with his free hand.   Fiona keeps expecting me to help because I am her sister. She passes with an armful of plates and shoots me a dark look. Then she remembers that I am a guest and offers me some Chardonnay.   'Yes,' I say. 'Yes, I'd love some, thanks,' and we chat like grown-ups. The glass she fills me is the size of a swimming pool.   It makes me want to cry to think of it. It must have been 2002. There I was, just back from three weeks in Australia and mad -- just mad -- into Chardonnay. My niece Megan must have been four, my nephew nearly two: fantastic, messy little items, who look at me like they are waiting for the joke. They have friends in, too. It's hard to tell how many kids there are, running around the place -- I think they are being cloned in the downstairs bathroom. A woman goes in there with one toddler and she always comes out fussing over two.   I sit beside the glass wall between the kitchen and garden -- it really is a lovely house -- and I watch my sister's life. The mothers hover round the table where the kids' food is set, while, out in the open air, the men sip their drinks and glance skywards, as though for rain. I end up talking to a woman who is sitting beside a plate of chocolate Rice Krispie cakes and working her way through them in a forgetful sort of way. They have mini-marshmallows on top. She goes to pop one in her mouth, then she pulls back in surprise.    'Ooh, pink!' she says.   I don't know what I was waiting for. My boyfriend, Conor, must have been dropping someone off or picking them up -- I can't remember why he wasn't back. He would have been driving. He usually drove, so I could have a few drinks. Which was one of the good things about Conor, I have to say. These days, it's me who drives. Though that is an improvement, too.   And I don't know why I remember the chocolate Rice Krispies, except that 'Ooh, pink!' seemed like the funniest thing I had ever heard, and we ended up weak with laughter, myself and this nameless neighbour of my sister's -- she, in particular, so crippled by mirth you couldn't tell if it was appendicitis or hilarity had her bent over. In the middle of which, she seemed to keel off her chair a little. She rolled to the side, while I just kept looking at her and laughing. Then she hit the ground running and began a low charge, out through the glass door and towards my brother-in-law.   The jet lag hit.   I remember the strangeness of it. This woman lumbering straight at Shay, while he cooked on; the hissing meat, the flames; me thinking, 'Is this night-time? What time is it, anyway?' while the chocolate Rice Krispie cake died on my lips. The woman stooped, as if to tackle Shay by the shins, but when she rose, it was with a small, suddenly buoyant child in her arms, and she was saying, 'Out of there, all right? Out of there!'   The child looked around him, indifferent, more or less, to this abrupt change of scene. Three, maybe four years old: she set him down on the grass and went to hit him. At least, I thought so. She raised a hand to him and then suddenly back at herself, as though to clear a wasp from in front of her face.   'How many times do I have to tell you?'   Shay lifted an arm to crack a beer, and the child ran off, and the woman just stood there, running her wayward hand through her hair.   That was one thing. There were others. There was Fiona, her cheeks a hectic pink, her eyes suddenly wet from the sheer la-la-lah of pouring wine and laughing gaily and being a beautiful mother forward slash hostess in her beautiful new house.   And there was Conor. My love. Who was late.   It is 2002, and already, none of these people smoke. I sit on my own at the kitchen table and look for someone to talk to. The men in the garden seem no more interesting than they did when I arrived -- in their short-sleeved shirts and something about their casual trousers that still screams 'slacks'. I am just back from Australia. I remember the guys you see along Sydney Harbour-front at lunchtime, an endless line of them; running men, tanned and fit; men you could turn around and follow without knowing that you were following them, the same way you might pick up a goddamn Rice Krispie cake and not know that you were eating it, until you spotted the marshmallow on the top.   'Ooh, pink!'   I really want a cigarette now. Fiona's children have never seen one, she told me -- Megan burst into tears when an electrician lit up in the house. I pull my bag from the back of the chair and idle my way across the threshold, past Shay, who waves a piece of meat at me, through rainbleached tricycles and cheerful suburbanites, down to where Fiona's little rowan tree stands tethered to its square stake and the garden turns to mountainside. There is a little log house here for the kids, made out of brown plastic: a bit disgusting actually -- the logs look so fake, they might as well be moulded out of chocolate, or some kind of rubberised shit. I lurk behind this yoke -- and I am so busy making this seem a respectable thing to do; leaning into the fence, smoothing my skirt, furtively rooting in my bag for smokes, that I do not see him until I light up, so my first sight of Seán (in this, the story I tell myself about Seán) takes place at the beginning of my first exhalation: his body; the figure he makes against the view, made hazy by the smoke of a long-delayed Marlboro Light.   Seán.   He is, for a moment, completely himself. He is about to turn around, but he does not know this yet. He will look around and see me as I see him and, after this, nothing will happen for many years. There is no reason why it should.   It really feels like night-time. The light is wonderful and wrong -- it's like I have to pull the whole planet around in my head to get to this garden, and this part of the afternoon and to this man, who is the stranger I sleep beside now.   A woman comes up and speaks to him in a low voice. He listens to her over his shoulder, then he twists further to look at a small girl who hangs back from them both.   'Oh for God's sake, Evie,' he says. And he sighs -- because it is not the child herself who is annoying him but something else; something larger and more sad.   The woman goes back to scrub at the gunk on Evie's face with a paper napkin that shreds itself on her sticky skin. Seán watches this for a few seconds. And then he looks over to me.   These things happen all the time. You catch a stranger's eye, for a moment too long, and then you look away.   I was just back from holidays -- a week with Conor's sister in Sydney, then north to this amazing place where we learned how to scuba dive. Where we also learned, as I recall, how to have sex while sober; a simple trick, but a good one, it was like taking off an extra skin. Maybe this was why I could meet Seán's eye. I had just been to the other side of the world. I was looking, by my own standards, pretty good. I was in love -- properly in love -- with a man I would soon decide to marry, so when he looked at me, I did not feel afraid.   Perhaps I should have done.   And I can't, for the life of me, recall what Evie looked like that day. She would have been four, but I can't think how that would play on the girl I know now. All I saw that afternoon was a child with a dirty face. So Evie is just a kind of smudge in the picture, which is otherwise so clear.   Because the amazing thing is how much I got in that first glance: how much, in retrospect, I should have known. It is all there: the twitch of interest I had in Seán, the whole business with Evie; I remember this very clearly, as I remember the neat and indomitable politeness of his wife. I got her straight off, and nothing she subsequently did surprised me or proved me wrong. Aileen, who never changed her hair, who was then and will always remain a size 10. I could wave to Aileen now, across the bridge of years, and she would give me the same look she gave me then, pretty much. Because she knew me too. On sight. And even though she was so smiling and correct, I did not fail to see her intensity.   Aileen, I think it would be fair to say, has not moved on.   I am not sure I have, myself. Somewhere up by the house, Marshmallow Woman is laughing too hard, Conor is elsewhere, Aileen's paper napkin, in a tasteful shade of lime-green, will soon leave shreds of itself on Evie's sticky skin, and Seán will glance my way. But not yet. For the moment, I am just breathing out.   From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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