An Actress Descends Into Madness, and Her Daughter Picks Up the Pieces

Fiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. ACTRESSBy Anne Enright The most fraught word in any language: mother. The most fraught of all familial relations: mother and daughter. A fraught loop in the mother-daughter knot: the daughter who must be her mother’s mother.

Add to this the daughter who must also be her mother’s nurse, sidekick, accountant and most ardent fan, and you have the steaming brew that is Anne Enright’s intoxicating novel “Actress. ” Katherine O’Dell, no Mother Machree, is Ireland’s star of stage and screen. Except that she’s not technically Irish; she was born in England. Her daughter, Norah, our narrator, takes us through her mother’s career, which began with a troupe of traveling players who brought theater to parish halls in rural Ireland.

Singled out for her giftedness, Katherine moves from theatrical roles in Dublin, London and New York to a turn as Hollywood’s pet Irish lass. Enright’s renderings of her movies have the pitch perfection of Joyce’s parodies of literary masters in “Ulysses. ” Katherine’s first film is “Mulligan’s Holy War,” the story of a feisty Irish nun named Mary who serves in a wartime French hospital to the sounds of a blues harmonica and the mutterings of a blinded boy named Jimmy. She falls in love with a tough-but-noble Irish-American soldier, but he dies in her arms after “a long and impossible night, some of which the lovers spend in prayer.

” “He has taken the moon with him and the sun too,” she laments, “and great is my fear that he has taken my God from me. ” But then, a miracle. The blind boy shouts in agony, “The sun, the sun! ” and Sister Mary arrives at his side.

“Oh yes, Jimmy, you can see it, you can see the sun! ” Audiences ate it up. Katherine’s other projects include a historical film in which she plays a medieval adulteress who enters a convent after her husband dies, and a thriller called “The Spiral,” in which she plays a “murdered woman’s unreliable sister, who smokes with trembling fingers. ” But her success is not long-lived: “Katherine O’Dell was, at 45, finished.

Professionally, sexually. In those days, when a woman hit 30, she went home and shut the door. ” Her roles dry up; she loses out to a younger woman from New Jersey — “she isn’t even Irish!