Pamela Norris
THE LITTLE THINGS
Taking Pictures
By Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape 230pp £12.99)

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Anne Enright achieved prominence by winning last year's Man Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering. Her previous fiction includes three novels and a collection of short stories, The Portable Virgin, which won the 1991 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Her first work of non-fiction, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, was published in 2004. All these books have attracted favourable notice, with reviewers praising her imagination and intelligence, her (frequently black) humour, and her scintillating use of language. Enright achieved additional notoriety in 2007 for her essay, 'Disliking the McCanns', published in the London Review of Books, in which she confessed to sharing the nation's ambivalence towards those all-too-publicly bereft parents. Her new book is a collection of short stories, perhaps rushed out by her publishers to capitalise on the enthusiasm generated by her recent prize.

There is, however, nothing rushed about the stories, several of which have already appeared in print or been broadcast on radio. What is striking, given that this is an apparently disparate collection, written at different times and for varied audiences, is its coherence. With the exception of 'Wife', all the stories are told from a female point of view. Enright's title, Taking Pictures, confirms her pithy approach. These are snapshots, but each of her brief, absorbing tales suggests the complexity and struggle of fully imagined lives.

The women in these stories run the gamut of female sexuality from teenage gropings to marriage, the tribulations of motherhood and temptations of adultery, and the unlikely bondings that result from proximity, bereavement and old age. What unites them is the difficulty of making sense of their relationships and of acknowledging their most private feelings. Tracing the ebb and flow of impulse and response, whose sources are often mysterious or unrecognised, Enright highlights the love and lust, jealousy and dislike, insecurity, irritation and violence that bubble beneath the surface of everyday encounters. In the title story, for example, a young woman's anxieties about love and marriage are subtly mapped through her relationship with another woman. 'In the Bed Department' explores how a middle-aged woman's tranquillity is disturbed, and her secret yearnings revealed, when escalators are installed in the department store where she works. Driven by self-preservation and desire, people often misinterpret each other and themselves. In 'Pale Hands I Loved, Beside the Shalamar', a young woman is slow to recognise her passion for a frail, possibly schizophrenic young man. In 'Pillow', set in a politically correct girls' dorm in an American college, the narrator, Alison, is alerted to the dangers of isolation only when a fellow-student, similarly far from home, attempts to murder her.

Each story is built around a series of impressions and telling details. In 'Honey', Catherine imagines her mother's cancer as a swarm of bees being smoked out by chemicals. Later, after her mother's death, an actual swarm will rescue her from a foolish one-night stand. In 'Wife', the sight of a livid scar across a woman's throat, like a 'second grin', forces an apparently civilised man to confront his capacity for harm and damage. As careful with words as she is with feelings, Enright selects images that are original, striking and satisfying. A woman's wrinkles 'sat lightly on her face, like they hadn't the energy to cut into the skin'. A down escalator falls 'like syrup; burying itself slowly in the flatness of the floor'. In a hospital ward for anorexics, a visitor observes 'a row of little sticks in the beds, knitting, jigging, anything to burn the calories off'.

'It's the little things that get to you', says the narrator in 'Green', a story about female rivalry and organic gardening (printed in last month's LR). 'It's the little things that make you turn to the window and wonder how long you have left, before you can decently die.' Modest and darkly comic, Taking Pictures unflinchingly records the randomness, uncertainty and longing that make up the texture of everyday existence. Enright's genius is to communicate the significance of these 'little things' in determining human destiny.

Pamela Norris's 'Words of Love' is published by HarperCollins.