Her stories show women at odds with their own lives and their own bodies. They are deeply confused about their own needs and wants and desires — not just emotionally illiterate, but emotionally dyslexic. Sex is routinely divorced not only from love, but even from desire: ‘Two people who don’t want to sleep with each other, snogging and clawing and pushing each other against cupboards.’
Enright is particularly good at the voices of the young, who are struggling to find their identities, feel their selves are ‘living in the wrong person’, and do not yet know what they want. ‘So Natalie put me straight. Who knows what Natalie knows or what she likes?’ begins one story; though the narrator believes ‘I am so in love with my boyfriend — at least I know that.’ In this teenage world of flip-flop relationships, morality and personalities, however, the narrator within a few pages knows that ‘the thing I have with my boyfriend isn’t love’. But this isn’t a ‘getting of wisdom’ story: she gains only ‘a feeling like a horror film, except really boring’, triggered by the smell of a friend’s parent’s sheets — ‘cool and unwashed, like something I really wanted, going stale’.
‘We are not connected’, thinks this teenager; and this belief continues to haunt the adults, even — or indeed particularly — when (dis)engaged in sex:
It should have been nice — I have no objection to sex — but with the migraine starting I felt as though he was a long way away from me, and every thrust set my brain flaring until I was very small and curled up, somewhere at the bottom of my own personal well.
In ‘Honey’, a woman whose mother has just died goes to a country house hotel, intending to betray her ‘sadly perfect’ partner with a fortyish ‘sex-machine’. But the affair is thrown ‘off kilter’: ‘there was something that had to happen before sex, something personal, and she didn’t know what it was’ — and there is a distinctly Plath-esque swarm of bees in the hotel garden.
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