Novel
What Are You Like?
Anne Enright · 2000
Synopsis
In Dublin, in 1965, Anna dies giving birth to twin girls. Unable to raise two children, their father, Berts, keeps Maria, who grows up in the Dublin suburbs, and lets Rose be adopted by a well-off couple near London. The novel follows in turn, over more than twenty years, these two sisters who know nothing of each other: Maria abandons her studies for New York, where a photograph of herself as a child, which she does not recognise, unsettles her; Rose, for her part, sets out to find her birth parents.
Context
The novel came out in London from Jonathan Cape in 2000, then in New York from Atlantic Monthly. It won the Encore Award in 2001 and was shortlisted for the Whitbread novel award. The fragmented narrative moves from one sister to the other and also dwells on Berts, on his second wife, Evelyn, and on Anna. Critics noted a precise evocation of Irish and English milieux, and a biting irony, not least towards nuns.
Who it is for
For following two destinies separated from the very first day, between Dublin, London and New York, by a novelist whom the Booker Prize would crown seven years later.
Prizes and reception
Bernice Harrison, in The Irish Times, judged it superb and funny; Gabriele Annan, more severe, faulted it for excesses of style.