oct23-upload

Birds are a lot like life: glorious to behold but gone far too quickly. But unlike the act of bird watching, the glorious aspects of life are counterbalanced by complications—paramount among them, the challenges of relationships. That’s the dynamic Anne Enright explores in her achingly beautiful new novel.

The Wren, the Wren is set in Ireland, and its key relationships are between a mother, her daughter and the daughter’s absent grandfather. Under other circumstances, Phil McDaragh might be a grandfather worth bragging about. He’s justly celebrated for his love poems, which Enright includes throughout the novel. But Nell never knew him because he walked out on his family when his wife—Nell’s grandmother—developed breast cancer.

Enright toggles between the perspectives of Nell and her mother, Carmel. At 22, Nell is just out of college and is “poking my snout and whiskers into the fresh adult air.” She gets a job writing content for an agency and begins a relationship with Felim, whose “party trick is to pick people up by the head,” a habit less distressing than Nell’s suspicion he’s still seeing a previous girlfriend.

For Carmel, the specter of Phil’s departure lingers both in her nurturing side and in a cautiousness toward men. In one of the novel’s many marvelous character depictions, Carmel remembers Phil wearing tweed jackets with pockets “dragged out of shape by little books and cigarette packs” and how the “chewed plastic of his glasses stuck out over one ear.” He was the type of man who would break a chair in frustration when he couldn’t find his watch. When Nell was born, Carmel “did not give [her] to any man…. Because this was her baby, and hers alone.”

In lesser hands, The Wren, the Wren might have been unbearably downbeat. But Enright’s exquisite prose and sympathy toward her characters make it a rewarding experience. Late in the book, a character says, “You think you can walk away, but you really can’t walk away, because, guess what? There isn’t anywhere else to go.” That’s another distinction between humans and birds, as Enright elegantly points out: Both species have their challenges, but when times get tough, it’s easier for birds to rise above it all.

Ayana Mathis’ outstanding sophomore novel, The Unsettled, separately follows a mother and daughter, Dutchess and Ava Carson, in the mid-1980s as they fight to build lives with a sense of stability, family and home.

Dutchess, a former nightclub performer who found a husband and a hearth in Bonaparte, Alabama, is struggling to save her adopted historically Black town. Racist violence has already claimed her husband, Caro, who was murdered by local whites decades earlier. Now, gentrification and a mysterious new visitor threaten to rob Dutchess of what she believes is her lone legacy: the land on which she has lived for 40 years.

Meanwhile, her daughter Ava embarks on a different quest: In the wake of Caro’s death and Dutchess’ near self-destruction, Ava wanders to Philadelphia, where, after a failed marriage and a stay in a squalid women’s shelter, she finds herself once again in the arms—and under the influence—of Cassius Wright, a charismatic former Black Panther and the father of her son, Toussaint. Along with a handful of other acolytes, Ava and Cass create Ark, a haven for Black people in search of economic and political freedom. But Ark soon becomes a house of horrors as Cass becomes increasingly tyrannical.

For both Dutchess and Ava, the stakes of making and keeping a home are high, and their willingness to go great lengths to achieve their dreams often causes unspeakable pain for the people who love them most. Their greatest hopes for redemption might lie in Toussaint, who is his mother’s secret and could ultimately be his grandmother’s salvation.

For readers who loved Mathis’ blockbuster debut The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, The Unsettled is another tale of a dynamic family and the aftereffects of intergenerational racist violence, but these new characters have voices and stories all their own. In short but perfectly paced chapters, Toussaint, Ava and Dutchess tell of not only their disappointment and despair but also their dreams, crafting a heartbreaking tale about Reagan’s America that deftly weaves the past and present into the possibility of a bright, if still-unfolding, future.

Read our interview with Ayana Mathis on The Unsettled.