The short story can be a revolving door, whisking the reader quickly around, only to leave him facing another door, the next story. But this dazzling collection of stories achieves the very difficult: a progression of crafted fragments which emerge as a sharp, quenching portrait of contemporary life.
Enright’s people, mainly women, rifle through the contents of their lives as if they are clearing drawers, and come to blunt conclusions. Joking and conspiratorial or regretful and forlorn, the voices confide with exquisite intensity.
‘In the Bed Department’ finds middle-aged Kitty selling mattresses as she watches workmen install a new escalator. The moving steps are ‘beautiful and they never stopped and they finally got on her nerves’; when a brief affair brings the unexpected, she discovers a wry, affirming joy in the very up-down motion of life. In ‘Yesterday’s Weather’, a visit with the in-laws becomes a battleground of wills for a young couple with a baby.
Enright pares down a character tidily, like a small sweet fruit. Her freewheeling Irish exchange student, in ‘Pillow’, rooms with three women in an American college dormitory, one of them an inscrutable Chinese girl. Alone in the dorms at Christmas, the women enjoy the long quiet nights of an empty campus (‘Li sleeping her Chinese sleep in those nylon pyjamas: not quite Buddha but, still, my plastic charm’).
These narrative snapshots are skilfully framed and in-focus, the language forthright and fresh. ‘Taking Pictures’ is an astonishing album of voice, memory and emotion.
