Barnes & NobleThe Wren, The Wren: A Novel by Anne Enright

The poetry of abandonment

Like most literature, this book deals with human character—our motives, behaviours, and emotions. The Wren, the Wren, features the damaged egotistical poet, Phil, his damaged forthright daughter, Carmel and her damaged becoming-self-aware daughter Nell, and goes behind, around and beneath the idea of transgenerational trauma transmission. Perspectives shift and the fragmented structure is interspersed with well-known Irish poems and some accomplished verses by the fictional poet. At times I found it hard to differentiate between Nell and Carmel, in part because the effects of trauma on individuals often include the same difficulties: anxiety, shame, hypervigilance, reactivity to stress, etc however the legacy of the Father Wound is clearly established. Phil’s public image as a famous poet belies a dysfunctional personal life. (Which is topical in light of revelations about the harmful behaviour of writers Munro and McCarthy). Largely absent from the home, Phil’s central first-person chapter conjured a cold and violent childhood, which would have left him short on empathy, to begin with. He loved women in the abstract, charmed them out of their nighties but hit the high road when things got tough in the real world. He left his sick wife, Terry, for an American wife and other liaisons presumably. He wrote the odd letter to his daughter and dedicated a poem, and those small mementoes, along with a recorded interview are all Carmel has to decode the familiar stranger that was her father. The impulse to look to his work for answers is Nell's only recourse, also. Her professional life as a travel blogger, writing about places she’s never been is juxtaposed with trying to figure out a man she’s never met but who, in so many unseen ways, has shaped how she thinks, behaves and perceives the world. There’s a lot of love between Carmel and Nell, however, love, on the whole, is scarce. When affection is hard to attain it can corrode a person's self-worth. All three of Enright’s characters are products of this scarcity principle, displaying unhealthy behaviours, trust issues, feelings of inadequacy, and difficulties forming lasting relationships. Nell, however, whose sections are written in the first person is the one with whom the pattern might break. She is the one musing on empathy in the opening chapter and by the end begins to see that when you strip away the labels and the distortions of language, a bird is just a bird, a man is just a man, and life is just what it is. There are a few tangents and narrative detours that were less absorbing and hard to follow, some physical violence, degrading sexual acts, and animal cruelty but all in all, a good novel.