Irish novelist Enright ("What Are You Like?", 2000) offers another
unusual tale notable for both its lovely language and its mere
suggestion of a plot. Up until the moment of Stephen's arrival,
Grace leads a fairly conventional life. She has a steady job that
she doesn't particularly like, siblings she doesn't get on with, a
tiresome mother, and a father struck down by a stroke. Although the
beautiful Stephen doesn't change any of those things, his mere
presence is a miracle: he's an angel. He killed himself in 1934 and
like all other suicides has been sent to earth to help those in
need. Grace can't imagine why she was chosen, since her life is
fine (or is it?), but with Stephen sleeping in her bed every night,
she's not about to complain. Not that her repeated attempts at
seduction bear any fruit: Stephen answers to a higher power than
his angelic libido and takes up other tasks around the house,
mainly painting everything white. He effects subtle differences in
the lives of all he touches (a womanizing co-worker of Grace's
suddenly falls in love with his own wife), but in Grace's more than
anyone else's. She begins a journey through memory that brings her
back to her father and the eponymous hairpiece. As a child she
considered his toupee friendly, a sort of pet, but as she grew she
realized the absurdity of the brown, poorly made piece of horsehair
perched atop his head. After two strokes, Grace's father lingers in
the front parlor speaking gibberish, making a reunion difficult.
Yet her attempt is miracle enough, his lack of coherent speech
hardly an obstacle. Enright's own language is wry and fluid, but
the story itself is a shadowy thing: too much light, and it will
disappear altogether. Not for all tastes, then, but those with a
penchant for the delicate and subtle will relish it. (Kirkus
Reviews)
'It was a tough, wiry wig with plenty of personality. It rode
around on his head like an animal. It was a vigorous brown. I was
very fond of it as a child. I thought that it liked me back.' Anne
Enright's extraordinary first novel is narrated by Grace, a TV
producer, whose life is transfigured when she answers the door to a
fully-fledged angel. Stephen was a bridge-builder in Canada before
he killed himself, but now that he has come to stay with Grace he
spends the night hanging by the neck in her shower, to help himself
think. Needless, to say, she falls in love, moving steadily from
the spiritual to the anatomical. Meanwhile as her TV day job on the
'Love Quiz' begins to spiral out of control, on the other side of
her life is her father, benign, bewigged and stricken by a stroke
-apparently mad but probably the sanest person in her life. As the
three worlds meet and merge in a forest of contradictions, we watch
Grace take the pacific path from cynicism to innocence, as all
around her the novel thinders to a conclusion.
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