Irish author Anne Enright's work had been earning quiet accolades for years, but the clamor grew far louder when her novel The Gathering nabbed the 2007 Man Booker Prize. Now she returns to BEA as a speaker at today's Author Breakfast in advance of this fall's release of her latest novel, The Forgotten Waltz (Norton, Oct.).
"In terms of the business of buying and selling books, it changed a lot when I won the Man Booker Prize in 2007," says Enright. "The wolf was no longer at the door."
Her previous output had included three critically well-received novels—The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like?, and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch—as well as a smattering of nonfiction and short stories. The Gathering was notably set in Enright's home country of Ireland, exploring the secrets of the Hegarty family after the drowning death of the narrator Veronica's brother Liam. Enright describes the story as "very dark and sexual." She also notes the success it met with came as something of a surprise, purely due to its nature. "It was almost unfashionable to talk about the dark side of Ireland in 2007, when The Gathering came out. There was a fantasy hysteria toward the end of the boom that was amazing," says Enright. She began to think of her next novel in that context. "I thought, I must soak up some of that in the blotting paper for the next novel."
Enter The Forgotten Waltz. Publisher Norton hopes it will draw in the same readers who fell for The Gathering, characterizing it as a "haunting novel of desire and infidelity." The story follows Gina Moynihan, a resident of suburban Dublin, as she begins an affair with a married man. The affair grows increasingly complex as it runs its course and the man's young daughter becomes involved.
"This book is about romance, an affair, infatuation, desire—not necessarily about sex," says Enright. "I was looking for a good boom subject, the helter-skelter journey from riches to rags."
Although this is Enright's first novel since winning the Booker, she did publish a collection of short stories in the meantime, Yesterday's Weather. The gap between longer works was actually related to the prize: "I was kept from the desk."
While writing this novel, Enright tried to "go toward the reader," she says. "My modernist/cubist impulses, I kept them firmly in check. This novel is linear. I wrote it deliberately from A to zed."
But readers will find parallels to The Gathering, such as a flawed, witty first-person narrator. "You always think novels are different, and then realize they're the same," Enright says, laughing. As for her next book, she will say only that it will be in third person, a switch she's eager to try. "It's in the air but too soon to talk about it."
