THE WREN, THE WREN by Anne Enright

Three generations of an Irish family tell their stories, but there’s not really that much to tell.  Phil, now deceased, was a fairly well-known poet who checked out of his marriage for good when his wife developed breast cancer.  His daughter Carmel, whose chapters are third-person for some reason, claims never to have been in love, but she is a single mother to Nell, a twenty-something travel writer for places she has never actually visited.  I would say that Nell, whose uneventful narrative mostly reads like a diary, does travel to some exotic locales later in the book, and I was never clear on how she had the money to do so.  She never knew her famous grandfather and sees and hears him only via old TV interview footage.  Nell’s passion, though, seems to be birds and not just the ones in her grandfather’s poetry.  Oddly enough, Phil’s first person coverage is shorter than that of either of the women, and he is the narcissistic one. His celebrity gave him the right, in his mind, to go ballistic when he couldn’t find his watch, which he happened to be wearing.  My favorite section of the book is where Nell is watching videos of deaf children’s reactions when they receive cochlear implants.  Now that kind of story might be a good basis for a book plot, but this book really does not have one.