Attention by Anne Enright review – sparkling reflections on life and literature

In addition to producing eight novels over the past 30 years, Anne Enright has always written nonfiction around the edges. This has mostly taken the form of essays for the literary pages of the NYRB, the LRB and, indeed, the Guardian. Attention is a collection of 24 of the best, each with a new brief introduction by Enright herself. The work is culled mostly from the past 10 years, with the latest dated “Autumn 2025”, which suggests that she was still blowing on the ink as it went to press.

A decade ago most of these pieces would probably have been called “personal essays”, but that now seems redundant. Everything is personal with Enright, which is what makes you want to read her even on subjects that don’t initially appeal. The cocaine trade in Honduras, say, or the production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days in a sodden field in the Aran Islands. And just when you worry that things might, actually, be getting a bit too fine-grained, such as the revelation that on holiday her husband likes to study menus carefully before choosing a restaurant, while she is more likely to dive in and scream for chips, Enright lobs in a line that explodes her text. Leaving her beloved Venice after a holiday with said husband, she is struck by the thought that the next time she visits, “I do not know if the disaster will have happened or not, because one day it will happen. One of us will die; the other will remain.” And just like that we are taken to the deepest, darkest mystery not just of Enright’s marriage, but of the kind of relationship that we might long for ourselves.

My feeling reading this collection is that each precious line needs going over twice. First for the sound and shape of the words, the second for their meaning. Luckily it turns out that this is how Enright does things too. Most of her essays about reading are in fact about rereading. When it comes to Joyce’s Ulysses which hangs over Attention like a sacred text, she maintains that it “invites meaning, then throws it back at you, multiplied”, with the result that you have to go over it again, and again. On these subsequent readings, she advocates having “a guidebook, notes, the internet at your fingertips”. She even suggests that Molly Bloom might make a bit more sense if she had inserted some full stops into her breathless monologue. There’s no reason why you couldn’t try putting them in for yourself.

Enright is happy to boast about the literary tradition of which she is a distinguished sprig, with Ireland having “more decent writers per acre than any other piece of land in the world”. From here she gives us essays on Edna O’Brien and Maeve Brennan before pushing further afield to Angela Carter and Alice Munro. In the case of the latter, she refuses to repudiate Munro over the fact that the writer stood by her husband when her daughter, then in her 20s, told her that he had sexually abused her as a child. “I have read Munro all my life, and reading her again in light of these revelations, I find that I cannot take back my great love for her; it was too freely given.”

She expects no one to be perfect, least of all herself, telling us unblushingly that “I love aid workers and I sort of hate aid workers because they are better than me”. Confronted with a pile of new novels, she cannot muster the desire to start reading. This is not because of any nonsense about being too distracted by modern life, but simply because she is no longer capable of the necessary acts of empathy – or “maybe I just got mean”.

Yet if Enright is generous about moral imperfection, she is a martinet when it comes to the business of literature, declaring tartly that “the dictum ‘write what you know’ does not include ‘so long as it’s dull’”. She is never dull, not even when discussing dinner choices on holiday, and in her acknowledgments she thanks the original editors of these pieces for insisting on “the values of accuracy, clarity, insight and lightness”. These, then, are the terms of engagement: she will write like a sharp, funny fallen angel and we will pay attention.