Anne Enright’s latest novel, The Green Road, has received mostly unqualified praise from the critics on both sides of the Atlantic.
The New York Times declared that the novel “bounces its readers through some fairly rocky terrain, not the least of it the green road of the title, as she charts the fortunes and misfortunes (mostly the latter) of the Madigan family over a period of roughly a quarter of a century.”
The NYT's David Leavitt wrote a lengthy review of Enright's latest novel in a loquacious, thinking-on-your-feet style. “Oh God, I thought, not another family saga that ends with a bad Christmas!,“ he remarked, before continuing in similar vein:
“Chip on my shoulder, I began reading. “Plodding realism” I wrote in the margin of Page 10 - but kept going. And then, on Page 12, something unexpected happened. The novel started to bounce me.”
“Enright’s prose glitters and gleams like sunlit water,” enthused Charlotte Heathcote in the Sunday Express. Emma Townshend in the Independent on Sunday wrote: “she is that rare thing: a very, very good writer. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr faded to shadow. I was not distracted from reading a single word.”
The Observer’s Alex Preston thought that the book would have functioned better as a series of short stories. “The reunion at the end of the novel, and the dramatic disappearance that shuttles us through the final pages, feel like unnecessary MacGuffins, put there to appease the conventions of plot.”
"The episodic, trailing, unclosed ending is perhaps the most brilliant part of this brilliant, devastating, radical novel," wrote Kate Glanchy in The Guardian.
Cristina Patterson in the Sunday Times was equally enraptured by the Fiction Laureate's prose. “The surgical precision of her writing can also make you feel that she can, in Wordsworth’s words, ‘see into the life of things’.
The Green Road is published by Jonathan Cape.
