Exclusive interview with Booker Prize winner Irish author Anne Enright

Enright talks about her past successes and tells us about her eagerly anticipated new novel, 'The Forgotten Waltz'

Anne Enright won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for her breakthrough novel The Gathering. This month her new novel The Forgotten Waltz is certain to win her even more accolades and new fans.  CAHIR O’DOHERTY talks to Enright about the Booker win and how it has – and has not – changed her.

There is so much to enjoy in Anne Enright’s disarmingly funny and simultaneously hauntingly sad new novel The Forgotten Waltz that it’s hard to know where to start. This is a book that will make you gasp at its brilliance, in between fits of knowing laughter.

First of all there is its vitality and narrative force, which is astonishing, and the brittle but brilliant voice of Enright’s young narrator, Gina Moynihan, a 32-year-old Dubliner with a gimlet eye that at times sounds remarkably similar to Enright’s own.

Then there are the details of Gina’s unexpected and all consuming adulterous affair with the much older Sean Vallely, a married man with a troubled young daughter, Evie, whose presence in the equation raises the stakes for all parties involved.

Novels about the fallout that accompanies dubious adult behavior in the bedroom are plentiful, but books about what happens after the thrill of a once illicit affair settling down into domesticity are rarer, and in particular when they are narrated by a female voice.

But Enright’s new book isn’t just about the collapse of a marriage. It also finds a way to meditate on the economic collapse of the Irish nation by focusing on the increasingly overheating economy of the Celtic Tiger just as it is about to burst.

The Gathering, with its theme of abuse and its consequences, struck a major chord in Ireland and abroad where it was, let’s be honest, usually more admired more than loved.

The Forgotten Waltz is remarkable for having, on the surface at least, a much lighter tone while managing to venture further yet into deep water, an accomplishment that eclipses the novel that made Enright’s career.

“Awards are nice but they have no creative value at all,” Enright tells the Irish Voice, quoting her fellow writer William Trevor.

“They don’t help write another book, or necessarily hinder you at all. I think I just got on with it, and bringing out this book I realized in retrospect was harder than it would have been otherwise, because it’s a much more grown up serious business now.”

Winning the most celebrated literary prize in the world was bound to have changed her. It introduced her to the unfamiliar world of flashbulbs and celebrity, after all.

But apart from the media circus surrounding the two books, there’s another story to consider.  Enright is the most accomplished Irish prose stylist of her generation, so she’s already a historical figure, and meeting her is in many ways like meeting a Beckett or a Joyce.

So to get away from all that, to get out of her own shadow and focus on the work itself, Enright decided early on what she wanted her latest book to be. “The Forgotten Waltz is a more accessible and public object than The Gathering was. That earlier book had been difficult to write and was tormented in its process and possibly difficult to read. The Forgotten Waltz was deliberately easier to read. It’s a give to the reader,” she says.

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Nster.com