What Are You Like?
The Bible informs us that "There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother" and the strength of the metaphor is that almost anyone can understand the comfort and wholeness of the close sibling. In her book, What Are You Like, Anne Enright imagines this ideal in its ultimate form; the bond of twins.
The theme of this book is the discovery of personal identity as the title is not subtle in suggesting. A pair of twins, separated at birth and unaware of each other's existence seek to find meaning and definition for themselves as they approach middle age. In a non-linear sequence of chapters, Enright brings the two together and concludes with the solidarity that one can only imagine belongs to people who have shared the womb.
Another interesting dimmension is that Enright is Irish and spans the story between New York, Ireland and England.
Usually this is the sort of circumstance that makes for delightful reading: foriegn (can Irish be called exotic?) insight along with a theme that looks interesting. I read about the book on Amazon a while ago and after passing it over several times in bookstores I decided to chance it one evening in Sioux Falls.
Unfortunately, my initial reaction to the book (just finished tonight) is not so good. Enright can't seem to help herself from returning to a mantra of female oppression ad nauseum and dramatizing it:
This is where women cry, thought Evelyn. They cry into the sink. They cry into the dirty water and they keep crying as they rinse and stack. Where should she cry so that he would see her? She could climb on top of the fridge and cry there. She should climb on to the roof and roar.
That society enforces upon us roles and that women suffer, it is noble that one would write so. But by poetic overstatement Enright defuses her statements into the emotionally brittle melodrama one would expect from bad television. There are men in this book, but what men one finds are usually harmless and irrelevent or ingorant destroyers.
There are two things that stood out to annoy me most: lack of choice and insufficient premise. The first is embodied in the lives of the twins who, until the conclusion are kicked through life the way you might kick a stone as you walk down a path. Stagnation followed by a rough change followed by more stagnation. Yawn. The second, insufficient (or lack of) premise comes from the non-linear snippets of thoughts and scenes that Enright entreats the reader to: a woman in a room with a man she just slept with imagining him dead, a nun for whom the worst part of the day is bedtime because she strips before putting on nightclothes - a sort of rich prose that lacks substance and goes nowhere.
About half way through I wanted to put it down but having already been on haitus from Immortality I felt the need to finish something and just willed my way through to the end. I'm going to have to read something more fun next.
12:21:42 AM 
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