What Are You Like?
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From a Man Booker Prize–winning author, a "hauntingly eloquent" novel of love, loss, family, and what a woman finds while in search of herself (The Seattle Times).
Born in Dublin in 1965, Maria Delahunty was raised by her grieving father after her mother died during childbirth. Two decades later, Maria is living in New York awash in longing and in love with the wrong man. Going through his things, she discovers a photograph of a little girl who looks an awful lot like her—but isn't her. Soon Maria begins to unravel a long-buried secret more devastating than her father's mourning, but bursting with possibility . . .
"Glittering . . . An Irish woman with a plate of steel somewhere between her skin and her heart . . . must travel back and forth, from childhood memories to the present, ratcheting herself up to adulthood as so many of us do." —Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"So sad that you want to laugh out loud. [This novel] deals with areas of experience and patterns of living that no one else has noticed." —Colm Tóibín, New York Times–bestselling author of Brooklyn
"The emotional tautness springing from bare-bones storytelling suggests Raymond Carver. The penetrative exploration of domestic relationships, especial among women, calls to mind . . . Anne Tyler." —Newsday
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After a flawlessly rendered first chapter, Enright, an Irish broadcast journalist, short story writer and novelist (The Wig My Father Wore), struggles to keep the assorted pieces of her novel together; it is fractured like the family it illuminates. Maria Delahunty is born in Dublin in 1965, delivered from her dying mother, who is comatose from a brain tumor. Maria's father, Berts, brings the baby home, and along with his new wife, Evelyn, they decide "to love each other if they could." But Maria grows up conflicted about herself, unable to decide whether she should live in her middle-class home in Dublin or in New York City, "the country of the lost." There, she imagines she can reinvent herself, but she ends up cleaning apartments. At 20, she falls in love with a man who carries in his wallet a picture of someone who looks strangely like her as a 12-year-old. Meanwhile, in England, a young woman named Rose, adopted by a wealthy family and also feeling curiously ill at ease about herself, decides she is not talented enough to pursue a career as a violinist, and begins to shoplift. At the same point, the two young women begin to search for each other, leading them back to that impulsive decision the bumbling though well-meaning Berts first made in the maternity ward. Enright's story is compelling, and she writes effectively and generously in the points of view of her various characters, especially in the flat, resigned voices of Evelyn and Berts. The facets of her plot keep multiplying, however, and the cut-and-paste sentences are more perplexing than evocative, e.g., "His head was full of saxophones that turned into fish, and ordinary matchboxes filled with dread." The narratives of unhappy Maria and unhappy Rose take on a whining redundancy that mars an otherwise boldly written work. FYI: Dubliner Enright is a broadcast journalist for BBC Radio 4.
