The novel follows Maria to Manhattan where she ends up cleaning apartments and trying to pretend she's a sexual sophisticate. Her own mystery unravels when she falls in love with a boy who carries a photo of what looks like her, aged 12, in his wallet. "She had been completely robbed... She had the right mouth, but the wrong voice might come out of it." Meanwhile Rose is quitting music college and a dull lover and sensing that she "has the kind of mind where nothing was ever enough".

Enright balances the mystery of their provenance superbly and her handling of the character's inexplicable alienation is astounding. Physical sensations are revealed in a fresh, visual and highly sensual way. When Rose's boyfriend jolts out of her during sex, "he laughed, all angry and flustered like he had pulled his head out from under a waterfall".

Maria's visit to the family farm has some of the most vivid descriptive writing in recent Irish fiction. You can feel yourself at the Sunday lunch, where "men ate their way through to the china, mashing potatoes to sop up the gravy, shaking the salt, their movements obliged and tragic as they picked their way through the teacups and the tiny jug for milk".

Despite the emotional intensity of the narrative, the tone is never overwrought nor the prose maudlin. The language startles and spins from the opening line: "She was small for a monster, with the slightly hurt look that monsters and babies share, the same need to understand." The moments of psychic connection between the twins and the ending are wisely underplayed and the overall effect is as haunting as Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark. This is an assured, compelling novel about identity, loss and messy business of recovery. --Cherry Smyth

Both girls have big problems. Maria, from her earliest years, is always asking, "What are you like?" and looking into mirrors. Sometimes violent in arguments, she sleeps around, gets stoned, attempts suicide, and suffers a nervous breakdown. She believes she "does not have a talent for life." Rose is a sadist who taunts the foster children her parents take in, goading one boy into throwing a kitten through a window and later trying to drown him. She believes there is "a hole in her head, a hole in her life." (Perhaps it is that hole she is trying to fill when she goes on her shoplifting expeditions.) Neither girl seems to have profited in any way from "nurture"--only nature counts here, and finding your twin, even when you don't know you are a twin, is so compelling an urge that it overwhelms any attempt to live a normal life.

With her very staccato style of short sentences, most having the subject at the beginning, Enright machine-guns her story at the reader. Her in-the-face style is emphatic and unrelenting as her narrative jumps from 1965 to 1985 to 1971, etc., from Dublin to New York to London, and from Maria to Rose and, eventually, to Anna, their mother. The story is sometimes difficult to follow, as the connections which explain some of the episodes do not occur until later in the book. Tellingly, Enright has to rely on several extreme coincidences to bring the strands of her story together and achieve some sort of resolution. The plot, such as it is, strains credulity, and if you don't agree with her thesis regarding the inborn compulsion of twins to find each other, even when they don't know they are twins, you will find this book difficult to accept. Mary Whipple


self conscious and pretentious   March 26, 2001
 7 out of 13 found this review helpful

I found the book very self conscious and almost painful - I couldn't read beyond the first few chapters. Skipping ahead, the rest of the book seemed to dwwell self-indulgently on issues of 'identity' and 'sexuality' - whatever identity and sexuality are.

Not much dialogue to liven things up with - just page after page of self conscious prose. I was disappointed as the book cover looked really intersting. Perhaps it was just me - maybe I didn't get it.