The Forgotten Waltz [Hardcover]

Anne Enright, author of the 2007 Booker Prize winner, The Gathering, has written a new novel called The Forgotten Waltz. It is told from the point of view of Gina Moynihan who has a lust-filled affair with a married man, Sean Vallely. They first meet at a garden party hosted by Anne's sister Fiona, and progresses from there. At first there are innocent (and not so innocent) looks, and then on a business trip in Switzerland, the affair begins in earnest.

When Gina first sees Sean at Fiona's garden party, she is happily married to her husband, Conor. There are no outward signs that there is trouble in the marriage and, as I read this book, I did not see the marriage and any shortcomings as a reason for the affair. Gina saw Sean, felt lust, and let her impulses prevail. Sean is married and has a child named Evie who, at the time that Gina first meets Sean, is four years old.

The novel is not told in any particular linear order. It is related to the reader in fragments of memory that Gina recalls. "So don't ask me when this happened or that happened. Before or after seems beside the point. As far as I was concerned, they were happening all along."

Always playing a key role is Evie, Sean's daughter. When she is five she begins to have childhood seizures that continue for many years. Annette, Sean's wife, is vigilant about Evie's medical care and appears not to notice that Sean is otherwise preoccupied with Gina. Evie, however, has the sense that something is happening in her home that is not quite normal. At one point, she even sees Sean and Gina kissing on the stairs of her home.

The novel takes place at the start of Ireland's economic boom in the nineties and progresses to the depressions that hits later on. As the novel starts, people are making more money than they know what to do with, buying second homes with ocean views and dropping hints about all the money that they have. By the time the novel ends, people are lucky just to have jobs. Their houses have been on the market for a very long time and no one is buying. The market has seen a real depression.

Gina tells the whole story in the first person and we go along with her as she does her best to remember what happened between her and Sean. She strongly believes that Evie is responsible for her and Sean's love. Evie's watchful eyes, times of poor health, and perspicacious study of her father and his lover mark an ever-present omen for Gina.

As the affair progresses, Gina finds out that she is not the first person Sean has been unfaithful with. There was a young woman in his office, many years ago, that Sean had courted and loved. Gina is careful not to ask Sean too many questions about this as she wants to see their relationship as special and romantic, which it is, but as life goes, it is not that unique. "Every normal thing he said reminded me that we were not normal. That we were only normal for the twelve foot by fourteen foot of a hotel room. Outside, in the open air, we would evaporate."

During the course of the affair, Gina deals with the death of her beloved mother, Joan, her estrangement from her sister, Fiona, and the breakdown of her marriage to Conor. She tries to see these events in relationship to the affair but they all have a full life separate from her love for Sean.

It takes Sean a long time to leave his wife, time that Gina waits for him in agony and pain. She had hoped they'd be together by Christmas but as April comes around, Sean is just beginning to move into Gina's home. "It was delicate business, being the Not Wife."

The affair takes on a triangular pattern - Sean, Gina and Evie. "I said it to Sean once - I said, if it had not been for Evie, we would not be together - and he looked at me as if I had blasphemed." "As far as he is concerned, there is no cause; he arrived in my life as though lifted and pushed by a swell of the sea."

The book is filled with musical metaphors and reads poetically. Enright is a master of the inner mind and our deepest thoughts. She not only tells a story but she captures lives, sparing no moment, no movement and no detail. Nothing is too small for her to notice and reflect on. In fact, it is the small things that make up the big deeds that change our lives from one second to the next.

I loved this book....up until the last chapter when I felt as if it ended so abruptly I actually thought there must have been an error in the printing, that the blank pages after the "About the Author" note were perhaps meant to have contained an epilogue. Sadly, they were just that: blank pages that left me feeling as if I'd been led up to a glorious mountainside only to be carelessly abandoned.

I'm simultaneously reading another book, a memoir in which the author's daughter is referenced as waving her arms in a circular motion while rolling her eyes, asking, "Point?". That is exactly how I pictured myself at the end of this otherwise artfully woven tale.

I was easily drawn into the narrative; how a chance meeting eventually impacted not just the lead character's life, but of course those around her as well. At the same time, I did find the author's frequent intergections of "I think"'s and "I mean's" to be a bit cloying after awhile. Yes, it was as if the character were telling me a story in real time, but I have friends who tell such yarns with so many intergections of "you know's" I soon tire of listening.

However, unlike some other reviewers, for the most part I enjoyed the texture of Enright's prose. The following entry, during the early part of the book, particularly resonated with me when she described the man with whom Gina, the first person character, becomes involved:"...a man who, in his Speedos, was not exactly a siren song. He stirred us up. Everything he said was funny and everything seemed to do you down. Or buoy you up. He could do that too.....Even in the strong sun, I was caught by the beauty of his eyes, which were larger than a man's should be and more easily hurt. I saw the child in him that afternoon, it was easy to see: an eight-year old charmer, full of mischief and swagger. But I don't know if I saw how tactial it all was. I don't think I saw the way he was threatend by his own desires, or how jealousy and desire ran so close in him he had to demean a little the thing he wanted". I immediately thought, "I know this man", both then and in the various descriptions of him that followed. At the same time, I had to wonder why Gina, an otherwise bright woman, neither questions nor stands up to the frequently demeaning words and actions of such a wounded man-child. Who is it she's trying to heal? If it's herself, we have painfully little insight.

Where does this story of loss, love and blended relationships all lead? Perhaps that is precisely the point Enright stives to make, but I found as a reader it was unsettling. I don't need happily-ever-after or all-tied-up-in-a-bow endings but this left me feeling as if the denouement, a crucial part of a story, was placed alongside the cold Irish countryside setting, beyond my vision where I remain grappling for closure.

Enright has written a beautifully, painfully honest novel of the train wreck of infidelity breached on the immutability of marriage. Set in Dublin, it begins innocently enough, eyes meeting across a garden. Years pass before Gina and Sean begin the long, passionate involvement that destroys both their marriages. Once engaged, neither has the desire to stop, entranced in a slow dance that obliterates everything else: "We fitted together our jigsaw love." Gina's narrative seduces, rationalizes the inevitability of this union, making the reader complicit in her obsession, her need for this flawed man who is exceptional perhaps only to her. This is the song of the other woman, one who appears helpless to resist the secret couplings, the falling away of spousal intimacy.

The jarring note in Gina's drama is the existence of Sean's child, Evie, a daughter with problems that cause her mother great anxiety, her father an excess of distraction: The fact that a child was involved made everything that much harder to forgive." Evie is as real as the affair that destroys two homes, casting a shadow on the right to claim happiness in a spoken-for other, a vague guilt in pleasurable stolen moments as Gina and Sean "pulled the sky down... to settle over us like a cloth". Enright writes seamlessly of conflict, internal and external, the emotional detritus of the breaking of vows. But she does so with great skill, the language of the heart impossible to map- or control as Gina and Sean veer towards each other and away from their families. Collateral damage.

This author has the ability to capture minute details that etch themselves so precisely into our memories, tapping into childhood unsullied by reality, the love of a foolish father, the red lines left in a plump ankle by a child's elastic sock, the vulnerable, pale flesh of a lover's body, the soundless moue of a child's mouth before expelling a howl of outrage, the shame of stealing another woman's husband. Gina forces us to see her side, to feel empathy for her hopeless, selfish passion, to love and hate a man who turns to infidelity in an intolerable marriage, a wife's body scarred by discontent and the ravages of time. Reading this novel limned with humanity is to enter into a fugue state, to become Gina, with her vague needs and few demands, shadowing Sean like a second heart. Luan Gaines/2011.

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