Actress by Anne Enright
At one point in Taylor Smith’s Miss Americana, there’s a montage of scenes from her previous album tours. Each tour is a world apart from the previous. The entire performance is rechoreographed. All costumes, sets and dancers are reimagined. Swift tells us that female artists must reinvent themselves constantly to remain relevant, to remain palatable. At the time of filming Miss Americana, Swift was 29 and fully aware of her impending expiration date. She knows she’s on borrowed time. Regardless of the work it took to reach such heights, most female artists either fade or crash out of view after a certain age. A lucky few move into production roles. Female writers might be spared to some extent, but as Anne Enright has documented, very few female writers break through in the first place.
Taylor Swift is one of a long line of global stars. Her tribulations play out in real time on a billion small screens around the world. The global star phenomenon is relatively recent. In her latest novel, Anne Enright explores the life one of the first generation of global stars, Katherine O’Dell, who came of age in the post-war era and was an Irish theatre giant of her time. She performed on the West End, Broadway, and in Hollywood films. The story begins with O’Dell long dead, her later years mired in controversy. When Holly Devane, a postgraduate student arrives at the home of O’Dell’s only daugher Norah, she amuses and annoys Norah in her attempt to label Katherine O’Dell’s “sexual style”. This confrontation compels Norah to tell her mother’s story.
Enright’s Katherine O’Dell reads like a metaphor for the modern Irish state. We begin with the revelation that O’Dell was born in London to English parents – a fact that managed to remain out of the public domain. O’Dell’s father was the son of a British solider in Fermoy. Her father’s Catholicism functioned as the main cultural connection to Ireland. O’Dell came of age in the post-war period in the years in and around the declaration of the Irish Republic. She concocted her own Irish identity as a teenager on tour around Ireland with her actor parents on the rural theatre circuit. In a stage review of a Broadway show, a critic referred to her as O’Dell rather than her mother’s surname Odell. “Odell” went through a similar process of transliteration – an Anglophone’s impression of an Irish name – that all Gaelic surnames suffered at the hands of British colonists. As her star rose, she played an Irish woman so well she passed as Irish. No one ever questioned her Irishness. She became the global idea of Ireland, starring in butter ads and singing at Irish emigrant events. Later in life, after the major incident that led to her demise, a Garda from Gweedore reported that she spoke to him in a gibberish she claimed was Irish. Her gibberish, the Garda said, was a fairly good impression of the Irish language.
Some people are born stars. O’Dell had early opportunities to emerge as she stepped in to replace actors on her parents’ tour. The other players recognised her for what she was. She arrived in the acting world fully formed. She understood how to work the camera better than the directors. When she stepped out on stage, everything fell into place. Despite her rare gift, like every woman, she too had an expiry date. She left America for Ireland with a small, “privately” conceived child that does not appear to be the product of her stage-managed marriage to a gay co-star.
Enright’s novel moves recursively through key events and characters as Norah tries to make meaning of her mother’s life. In telling the story of Katherine O’Dell, Norah tells her own story. Norah cycles through a series of concerns, her unknowable paternity, her mother’s mysterious sexual life, the men that gathered around her in support and in judgement, and the bizarre event that led to her mother’s incarceration.
Taylor Swift knows she’s on borrowed time because of the Katherine O’Dells who went before her, their lives carefully studied and deconstructed. No solution has been found or proposed for the fact that our culture has an appetite only for young females. Half the Internet’s energy consumption goes into serving up images of young females, with an ever sliding scale of how young. We’ve long been sold the idea that the global market functions as some objective measure of value. Blame for something so abstract isn’t easily assigned. The market wants what it wants, we are told, as if we have no hand in the fine tuning and marketing of wholesale desire.
O’Dell makes failed trips back and forth across the Anglo-American world. She goes on smaller touring circuits. She is stubborn and ego-centric. At the same time as she finds herself written off as expired goods, male figures install themselves in the arts and literary world without having to work to maintain their position. These men emit no creative light of their own. They never deem themselves too old or undeserving of any pleasure or opportunity. They build their own empires off networks of artists. They manoeuvre themselves into positions where O’Dell has to seek their permission to work. They sit behind the camera and whisper about her and dismiss her. They laugh at her attempts to reinvent herself. She succumbs to heavy drinking and a cocktail of prescription medication.
Norah keeps pushing and uncovers a source of darkness in O’Dell’s past. In true Irish fashion, blame remains nonassignable. Even during Katherine O’Dell’s trial, responsibility for her own actions is diminished. Injustice seems societal and unspecific. Enright writes injustice into the very air we breathe.
Every now and again, Norah speaks directly to a “you” – her husband. Their union seems like the centripetal force tethering Norah to a life of stability compared to her mother’s. The “you” of this novel had encouraged Norah to write about her mother. The “you” of this story gave her permission. This reminds me of ancient Greek novels I studied such as the Aethiopica, where the story is female driven, but all successful female characters had a network of supportive men guiding them at all times. Women like O’Dell, who lived without male blessing, had negative outcomes.
O’Dell and Norah’s story unfolds to reveal not only their own story but a cultural history of Dublin. Each scene, sentence and phrase builds an impression of modern Ireland with all its porter bellies and rebel tunes. Enright’s writing style comes close to achieving what Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk does in his novels: a gentle unfurling of the soul of a nation disguised as a book.