A potent seam of violence: The Wren, the Wren, by Anne Enright, reviewed

The Irish novelist Anne Enright is now in her sixties. Her deceptively modest new novel, The Wren, The Wren, opens with a long section narrated by Nell, a woman in her early twenties living in contemporary Dublin. Nell scrapes by, ‘writing content non-stop’: travel pieces about places she’s never been to, stories for a wealthy ‘actress/eco-influencer’. Adrift and vulnerable, she falls into an on-off relationship with a man called Felim, who is emotionally cruel and photographs her naked without her permission.

With this extended portrait of a much younger woman, Enright quietly establishes her excellence. Laid against similar endeavours by writers of her generation – Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs (2009), Deborah Levy’s August Blue (2023) – Enright demonstrates a rare fluency in the language of youth. This doesn’t mean that Nell’s narration sounds like it was written by a 23-year-old. We get to have it both ways: Enright articulates certain insights better than a younger writer might be able to, yet Nell still convinces as a millennial (or possibly even Gen Z-er).