ABSTRACT
Midway through The Green Road, Anne Enright depicts a "woman chased into a corner by her own house", an uncanny adaptation of a longstanding association of women with domesticity. Although many recent novels use such technical means to fault neoliberal ideology for its relentless focus on development, they find themselves formally indebted to its subterranean structural premise, the philosophical framework of neoliberal immediacy which presents the status quo as natural and without alternative. The doxa here about how debts function-itself a neoliberal analysis of macroeconomics that stands in contrast to the Keynsian model that prevailed throughout much of the twentieth century-is conveyed in brief, syntactically straightforward sentences as though to emphasize its austere truth. Nevertheless, the novel’s overt critique of property speculators, corrupt ministers, and feckless bankers, as well as of the toothless fact-finding enquiry that structures the narrative, is mirrored by a critique of the Irish public itself.
