“Night Swim”
by Anne Enright
from the March 9, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
It took me a while to acquire a taste for Anne Enright’s work, but I’m so glad that I have. I think she’s got a nice mixture of darkness and humor, and I think she explores humanity with remarkable insight and subtlety. She’s about to publish a novel, Actress, but “Night Swim” is not an excerpt. As she says in her interview:
My short stories are only about themselves. They are the solution to their own riddles or non-riddles and, as such, they stay self-contained and indifferent to the rest of my work.
Very excited to see what we have in “Night Swim”!
Please feel free to share any thoughts you might have on “Night Swim” or Enright’s work in general.
I thought this was excellent. I loved the tone, the rhythm, and Enright’s brand of darkness that gets under the skin like a fungus. I’m not sure all that was going on, but I think she is so insightful as she looks at our anxieties.
I listened to her reading the story, so I may have missed something, but it seemed a nice illustration of Hemingway’s omission approach…. the story is so true, that she doesn’t need to say much about the story that explained the before, you “know” what happened…
I liked this but found it kind of familiar. I was reminded of Hadley and Munro–a middle-aged woman remembers some sort of transgressive experience–although Enright has her own voice and does create a nice sense of mystery and elision. The description of being disoriented in the black water is really skillfull.
Great story! But I don’t have a concept of what precipitated her stay at the nursing facility. Is that what “we know”?
I’ve started reading Anne Enright’s collection _Yesterday’s Weather_, which contains all of her previous collection _Taking Pictures_ (2008), plus “slightly edited” versions of her selection of her earlier stories. She turned 62 yesterday (Oct 11), and her 1st stories were published in 1989; so these date from about her mid 20s to probably under age 46. Since then I know of only the latest five in TNY. I hope there’s another volume coming.
Before I started this collection, I went to “archive” and read one of the stories from her first collection, _The Portable Virgin_ that she omitted here. Not bad, but not her best… She says the stories in _Yesterday’s,Weather_ are printed in reverse order, latest to earliest. She explains how her youthful writing reflects her misconceptions of being middle aged. I’ll be interested to see how they compare. Im jumping around the list.
I wonder if the little girl on the cover is Anne.
I’ve previously read little of her work, only a few stories. Would anyone recommend the “best” novel? I know she won the Booker for _The Gathering_. But I also read astonishing praise for _The Forgotten Waltz_. I admit I’m susceptible when someone makes it sound like the best writing ever—how bad can it be? Someone tell me, please!
Oh, about what happened: the paragraph about the smoking room! It didn’t register before. The “why” could be open to speculation/discussion.
Overnight, I went back to that and other later stories she read on TNY site. I found her the best of the author-readers I’ve heard: especially “The Hotel”.