Booker winner Anne Enright under scrutiny for slur

The essay was about Madeleine McCann, who was 3 years old when she disappeared this spring in Portugal. In the essay Enright tried to work through a cacophony of complicated emotions toward the girl’s parents, including reluctant voyeurism, distaste and pity. But newspapers here and in Britain picked out a sentence in which Enright said that she “disliked the McCanns earlier than most people” and ignored what she wrote afterward: that she was ashamed of the impulse and, in the end, rejected it. “Her publishers should have put a large brown bag over her head immediately,” Janet Street-Porter wrote in The Independent on Sunday, in a typical comment. “I urge you not to buy Enright’s book until she apologises for this slur.”

Enright did apologise for her essay “if it caused any hurt to the McCanns” and, in an interview back at home in this seaside suburb of Dublin a week or so later, described the article as “an emotional journey full of nuance and contradiction and self-appraisal” that had been misinterpreted. But while she did not want to be drawn into a longer discussion, what seemed clear was that the essay was of a piece with all of her writing: a subtle and not-easy-to summarise examination of intricate emotions that sometimes contradict one another.

The Gathering is Enright’s fourth novel. It features scenes from long ago that may or may not have happened, and questions—about motives, about family history, about what is real and what is imagine— that are never fully answered. The protagonist, Veronica Hegarty, has two children, a foundering marriage and a lot to resolve. Ideas come up, are examined, double back on themselves. Reading it is almost like being in a dream. The book may have a simple framework, but the feelings it deals with are complex and hard to parse. “She’s bumping against this large wall of pain to see which part hurts the most,” Enright said, speaking of Veronica.

She says: “I’m very interested in emotions when things are not resolved, when things are not clear, before they become defined. I was very, very loose in the writing. I didn’t analyse. I sent the bucket into the well and reached into a distant part of my brain, really, to produce this.