MemoirAccording to Richard Ellman, one of James Joyce's sisters stayed with him in Paris, on her way from Ireland back to her home in Trieste.
Before she arrived, Joyce heard that her husband in Trieste had just shot himself.
The Joyce family spent the weekend with her as planned, without breaking this unpleasant news, and then set her on a train to be met by her brother, Stanislaus, wearing a black armband, at her destination. I used to think of this story as a measure of the Joyce family narcissism, but it is perhaps also about Irish people's attitude to information - that your business is nobody's business, not even your own. Especially not your own. Perhaps it was the same mixture of shame and self-righteousness that gave us the sadism of Irish institutional life; the belief that people do not deserve to be told what they think they need to know. To withhold information is to withhold love; most keenly and especially when it is done "for your own good". AM Homes's electrifying memoir is, from the outset, about information.
Homes, an American novelist, was adopted as a baby. When, years later, her birth mother makes a tentative approach, she does it through a lawyer, who, in turn, approaches Homes's adoptive parents. They debate "whether or not to even tell" their daughter, before breaking the news. She, the much wanted child, the object of all this negotiation, is 31 years old. As the story of the adoption is retold, we hear that she might have been reared by another couple, but it turned out that, in a roundabout way, they knew the mother, which made the plan null and void, "not because there was something wrong with the mother, but because there was something wrong with knowing".
At 20, she is told that a neighbour collected her, as a baby, from the hospital, and she realises that this woman knows what her birth mother looks like - has always known - when she does not. "Did she look like me?" She cannot absorb the answer, suffering, as she does "the deafness that comes in moments of great importance". Later, the same lawyer routinely opens the letters her birth mother sends to her, as though her ordinary right to privacy has been superseded by other, more mysterious, rights and compunctions.
Homes realises that, whatever adoption is about, it is never about the child. Every other person involved in this story is perceived as having greater needs than her own need to know.
ALL OF THIS would be enough to provoke a rage of entitlement, but any rage that leaks into Homes's prose is careful and clean. There is no whining here, only a heartbreaking blankness, as this super-smart, successful young woman undergoes peculiar, almost suburban, humiliations in pursuit of biological connection. Her birth father will only meet her in hotels, as though she were his mistress, as her mother once was. He informs her, almost as soon as they meet, that he is circumcised. He says he would take her somewhere nice, if she had worn something better. "You don't wear jewellery," he says. He requires a DNA test of her, and then delays telling her the result "We'll talk when I see you. Tomorrow at four?" For her birthday he sends her a little snap-open gold locket, the kind you'd give to a little girl. "Is this jewellery? It is more like pre-jewellery, like a training bra." He calls her birth mother the Dragon Lady, a nymphomaniac, and a slut. As for the mother, despite hundreds of pleading phone calls, Homes, for the longest time, cannot bring herself to meet her face to face: "there is no end to her need". Finally her mother ambushes her after a book reading Homes does in their home town.
"You're not behaving," says her daughter, as she joins the tail-end of the book-signing queue - this, to a woman who was seduced at 17, lied to, abandoned; a petty fraudster who never got her life together after the birth of her only (as far as is known) child.
People do not behave well. Homes's parents' morality, or lack of it, is slow to strike her, because family is not about morality as much as need. What finally pushes her towards the typewriter is another monstrous act of withholding. Twelve years after her blood was taken away in labelled, signed, little vials, Homes asks for, and is refused, a copy of the DNA test results. Her father has lodged the results paper with his lawyer. The lawyer has mislaid the paper. The laboratory has destroyed old results. Can she rob his DNA for another test? Who owns this information?
DNA is itself, of course, "information". The question Homes asks is an urgent, modern one about identity. If DNA is a code, then what is the message? When we have deciphered it, what do we get? We get a string of letters and numbers, or we get a human being. It may turn out that the most useful legal tool we have to manage the evolution of human kind is the law of copyright. There is, however, no law in the world that can help us know who we are - or who our parents are, for that matter.
The Mistress's Daughter is a book made exquisite by the pain that produced it. Ruthlessly exact and unadorned, it is an endlessly generous, intelligent and compassionate account of one person's biological rage for the truth.
Anne Enright's latest novel, The Gathering, has just been published by Jonathan Cape
The Mistress's Daughter By AM Homes Granta, 238pp. £12.99