In high school english class we learned that one shouldn't use first person pronouns in papers. It takes away from the power of an argument. For some reason I think that it has generally been shied away from in novel form as well. Possibly because the reader might feel like she is trapped in a character's brain.
I felt frustrated and trapped in Gina's mind while reading
The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright. Gina is a married woman who has an affair which ruins her marriage and the guy's too. The plot jumps around chronologically, but over and over again you see the shallowness, selfishness, and repetitiveness of Gina's mind.
I'm glad I stuck with it though. Towards the end I wondered if Enright was writing in the style of Flannery O'Connor, or even that of C. S. Lewis' The Shoddy Lands. In Lewis' work, the main character finds himself in another's mind. At the end he writes:
"I was, for a second or so, let into Peggy's mind; at least to the extent of seeing her world, the world as it exists for her. At the centre of that world is a swollen image of herself....And how if, some other time, I were not the explorer but the explored?"
I feel like the writer is trying to show that the woman thinks she is doing it for love, for creativity and life, but it is all rotten in the end, rotten and empty. The last line of the book is the real zinger incriminating and direct, but perfect to show her all of this. No one is as interested in our selves as our own self.
I enjoyed the read as a sort of photographic negative, the opposite of what I want my life to be.
On another note, the author includes the real estate crash in Ireland. At the beginning of the book Gina and her husband buy a house, not because they love it, but as an investment. There is a line about how if you sat sit still you could hear value accruing, pennies and nickels bouncing around you.
After the crash the properties lose something too, or perhaps that is just the promise that everything always gets better, richer, and fuller floating away.
