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What Are You Like?: A Novel
by: Anne Enright

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780802138897
ISBN: 0802138896
Label: Grove Press
Manufacturer: Grove Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: April 08, 2002
Publisher: Grove Press
Sales Rank: 597705
Studio: Grove Press

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:

Anne Enright is one of the most exciting writers of Ireland's younger generation, a beguiling storyteller The Seattle Times has praised for 'the ... way she writes about women ...their adventures to know who they are through sex, despair, wit and single-minded courage.' In What Are You Like?, Maria Delahunty, raised by her grieving father after her mother died during childbirth, finds herself in her twenties awash in nameless longing and in love with the wrong man. Going through his things, she finds a photograph that will end up unraveling a secret more devastating than her father's long mourning, but more pregnant with possibility. Moving between Dublin, New York, and London, What Are You Like? is a breathtaking novel of twins and irretrievable losses, of a woman haunted by her missing self, and of our helplessness against our fierce connection to our origins. What Are You Like? has been selected as a finalist for the Whitbread Award. It is a novel, Newsday wrote, that 'announces [Enright's] excellence as though it were stamped on the cover in boldface.' 'Richly descriptive ... Slightly surreal, revelatory images are hallmarks of Enright's writing, which beguiles throughout.' -- Melanie Rehak, US Weekly 'Cool, wicked, and quintessentially Irish ... Anne Enright tells a sharp, stylish tale in an accent all her own.' -- Annabel Lyon, The National Post (Toronto)

Amazon.com Review:
Some novels you nibble away at, half unthinking. Anne Enright's prose bites back. The Irish author of The Portable Virgin and The Wig My Father Wore has produced a third book as unexpected and lively as a miracle child--or is it twins? She tells the story of a Dubliner whose mother died in childbirth. Maria is now 20, living in New York, cleaning houses, taking drugs, sleeping with strangers, and generally being in a funk. In a lover's bag, she finds an old photo of a girl who looks just exactly like herself, dressed in clothes she's never owned, posing with people she's never met. But this isn't some gooey, alternate-reality identity fantasy. Maria has, in fact, a twin sister. Though each is unknown to the other, we learn both their lives inside out as they head toward a giddily inevitable meeting.

This twinning tale suits Enright's style right down to the ground: Her mandate is to bump us into awareness, and if it takes double heroines, so be it. Her language does the rest of the work. On the very first page, for instance, she freshens the simple act of holding a baby into a joke: 'And they handed her on from arm to arm, with the dip that people make when they give away a baby--letting her body go and guiding her head, as though it might not be attached. Nothing worse than being left holding the baby, they seemed to say, except being left with the baby's head.' In fact, Enright is transfixed by the weirdness of the body, as when Maria visits a dairy farm: 'She is too old to dip her fingers in the milk and let the calves suck. Though when she does, a feeling she has never had before goes straight up her arm and into her right nipple. Hello, farming.' Enright writes fiction meant to surprise. But her message is surprisingly traditional: biology matters. --Claire Dederer

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Plumbing
[2.5 stars] After reading THE GATHERING, the book that recently won Anne Enright the Man Booker Award, I picked up this earlier novel to see whether it would share the same preoccupations. It does, in its interest in exploring how women feel and think, its concern with the dynamics of mostly dysfunctional families, and its obsession with the grosser aspects of the human body. It shares the same ambience: Dublin and England, though here with some scenes in New York thrown in. Here too, Enright has the reader piece the story together in fragments as she jumps around in place and time. Here too, she comes up with passages that are unusual, even poetic, but too often maddening in their obliquity; the following paragraph is typical:

"That night Evelyn dreamed of sperm and the smell maddened her. It lingered in the morning and made her ashamed. It was her fifty-third birthday. Time to throw things out, she ... Read More

Rating:

- STRANGE
The story line could be really interesting but the style of writing is hard to take. It reads more like a poem than a novel. The story itself is all over the place. The time and place are different in every chapter. It's very fragmented. I won't be reading anything else by this author.

Rating:

- rewards
I found this book an intriging mix of confusion and satisfaction. There were long stretches where I was utterly confused about what was going on or why the author was telling me such things interspersed with really beautiful descriptions or some other really satisfying passage that was truly enjoyable.

Do I recommend this book? Sure. Just remember that the disjointed feeling is intentional. If that sort of thing does not put you off, then you will enjoy this book for the hidden treasures it contains.

I can also say that despite the fact that Maria "sleeps around" quite a bit, it was not sexually explicit. I appreciated this. I get so sick of reading books that boldly refuse to leave any of the details to the imagination (or not as the reader chooses).

Rating:

- Twisted like candy thinking above the rainbow's shadow
The Author's concept of this odd book had to come from the seam of her eye where the mist and the rocks blow together like the brussel spouts of yesterday's backyard tire swing. If you liked this review, you'll love the book.

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