Anne Enright
The Wig My Father Wore
216pp. Cape. £9.99.
0 224 04055 3.

"Television", announced Salman Rushdie following the publication of The Satanic Verses, "is a medium as much as an angel is. Television is what we now have for archangels." The Irish writer Anne Enright has taken Rushdie's prophetic words to heart in her first novel, The Wig My Father Wore, an intellectually inventive fable, polished with a comic light touch. It explores the emotional life of its central character, Grace, a television producer in Dublin who is visited by an angel, and it does so with a sweetly articulated sympathy and a remorseless instinct for the ridiculous; a realism, you might say, that plays with magic but is sus-tained by recognition of the lurking absurdities of life.

Whereas Rushdie had Saladin Chamcha watching "a good deal of television, channel-hopping compulsively", Enright places Grace in charge of RTE's version of Blind Date, the ghastly, dayglo LoveQuiz. Grace is a successful career girl with a troublesome personal life: her father lies, inarticulate, after two strokes; her mother stoically carries on in quiet desperation; while Grace lacks the very thing she hawks, week after week, to the country at large: love.

The angelic mode is announced at the very opening of the novel when Stephen, a good-looking celestial visitor, knocks on Grace's front door and enters her life for the duration of the book. "He said being an angel wasn't a free ride", writes Enright. "He wished, for example, that I would stop looking where his crotch kind of glittered while the rest of him glowed."

The comic asides are one of the main pleasures of The Wig My Father Wore. It is usually only the most confident of writers who can conjure with figures such as angels without straining the narrative to breaking-point, but Enright just about manages to sustain the device because she has a firm grip on the domestic realities of her characters, and is always ready to deflate any suggestion of ethereal artiness with an earthy one-liner. While there is much in the novel which borrows from the uncanny repertoire of Angela Carter (reference to the crossing of thresholds, the world-within-worlds of mirrors, photographs, pictures), Enright's comic voice is all her own.

Humour is a necessary lubricant which keeps the novel's ideas slipping along, for Enright attempts to grapple with a subject of considerable magnitude love itself, "its weight and weightlessness"which Enright eloquently explores. Grace trades in love in its most crassly commercial and casual forms on the game-show LoveQuiz, but she is taken with the question of the most problematic and precious kinds of love: that between children and parents (particularly between daughter and father) and that between lovers.

Enright's wit and skill as a writer are admirably on show as she approaches her subject from an oblique angle, creating the "ineffable" Stephen in order to give form to her abstractions. He is not the only one: the wig of the title comically stands for the unutterable and disguised and displaced feelings which exist between father and daughter, while the television, a constant flickering presence, functions for what Thomas Pynchon in Vineland (another text glowing with emissions from the cathode-ray tube) called "an entirely different order of things". This "different order" which haunts the actual is ideal romantic love, never encountered directly in the book but a magnetic presence which haunts Grace from beginning to end.

Where the novel falters, however, is in its narrative scope. Intellectually ambitious it might be, but for a short novel (just over 200 pages) it is not without its longueurs. The narrative continually, and claustrophobically, folds inward into Grace's own mind, and so the pacing of the story is severely limited to one rhythm. Enright's first success was as a short-story writer (The Portable Virgin was published to considerable acclaim in 1991), and it is difficult to escape the conclusion that The Wig My Father Wore is an overgrown short story, intense, promiscuous and delightfully original in its thinking, but restricted in its movement. While Enright can focus on the abstractions of the emotions to fine and comic effect, her footwork is still a little pedestrian. The music of her prose might be as haunting as the music of the spheres, but she needs to find a few more steps to make her dance as engaging as her thinking.

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