Anne Enright
WHAT ARE YOU LIKE?
257pp. Cape. £10
0 224 06063 5

It takes a steady hand to write about baby-eating, even briefly. Jonathan Swift devoted a long pamphlet to the subject in 1729, but then he was satirizing the English moneyed classes, who would, it was implied, swallow anything providing it smacked of good financial sense. Anne Enright's poetically inclined second novel, What Are You Like?, begins shockingly and splendidly: "You felt this baby was all skin, holding the soft little parcel of her insides: her fresh little kidneys, the squiggle of her guts, her quail's bones. You could eat her, that's all, her bladder like a sweet little onion and her softly sprouting brain." It is 1965, and the baby is in the arms of Bert Delahunty, whose wife has just died of cancer in a Dublin nursing home, leaving him with a broken heart and two prematurely born daughters. One of them - the potentially edible Maria - he takes home and brings up. The other he leaves in the care of the nuns who run the nursing home; in a fit of sisterly whimsy, they call her Marie.

And so starts another saga of twins separated at birth. Maria is raised in Dublin by Bert. Marie is adopted, renamed Rose (still a good Catholic name), and grows up in Surrey. Genes work their mysterious ways - despite different upbringings, both girls like Mozart, the colour blue, and men with long backs. Both also abhor potatoes, and have strikingly big buttocks ("There's meat and two veg", observes Uncle Ambrose admiringly when he sees Maria from behind). And although neither knows of the other's existence, both sense that an important part of themselves is missing. For a while, it seems that never the twins shall meet, until in New York the twenty-year-old Maria falls for Anton, a Czechoslovakian with a long back.

Rummaging through his belongings one day, she is astonished to find a photograph of herself aged twelve. Anton, it turns out, was one of a procession of boys fostered by Rose's adopted parents; he and Rose had enjoyed a brief, chaste and pre-pubescent relationship in Surrey. Independently, the sisters start to investigate their past, and eventually Rose walks into the clothes store in Dublin where Maria works. Twin meets twin, England meets Ireland, and there is much rejoicing and comparing of notes.

A novel whose central theme is separation stands or falls by its ability to make the reader care about its characters. If that is lacking, as is the case with What Are You Like?, the chapters quickly devolve into a series of semi-independent sketches. The ambitious architecture of the book seems to prevent Enright from creating any sustained emotional impetus. She chooses to tell the story of the twins not as a single unfurling from separation to reunion, but by cross-sectioning their lives at certain definitive points. Chapters shuttle backwards and forwards through the years, divide their time between Dublin, New York and London, and shift speakers. This makes for staccato reading, with the abrupt jumps in time and space and the elisions of narrative working against any build-up of emotional momentum.

While patching together the plot - how did Rose become a social worker? when did Maria get into drugs? - it is hard to remain bothered about what is going on. Although there are several affecting incidents in the book, they are isolated, deriving their power to sadden from the skilful manipulation of local detail.

The component parts of the book are accomplished. Enright is a meticulous writer in the very best sense of that adjective, paying attention to rhythm, and to the individual image (the "huge, silent roar" of Notre Dame), without ever seeming over-intricate. She also has an eye for the ludicrous; among the walk-on characters are Wendy Shower, an American writer who is suing "the hospital where she was born because they had induced her mother early and so messed up her horoscope", and a nameless man in a public lavatory who pulls his penis out on a ribbon and urinates "holding it like a dog on a leash".

As well as leading to a general blurring of critical distinctions, the claims that publishers make for their authors can be simply absurd. Whom can we believe when everyone is described in superlatives? Anne Enright is clearly an important emerging talent, but she is not, as the blurb trumpets, "the most original Irish writer of her generation". In its quiet way, What Are You Like? is a bold and intermittently successful book. It takes on some big issues - identity, separation - and treats them with humour and perceptiveness. But in the end, reading it feels like putting on a suit of armour. You admire the workmanship and gleam of the individual segments, but find the whole outfit rather unwieldy and disjointed.

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