Interview: Anne Enright, author

These are details that endear. After publishing The Gathering, which won her the 2007 Man Booker Prize, Enright brought out an anthology of stories entitled Taking Pictures. It was my first encounter with her witty, astute take on humanity's foibles - and love at first read.

Enright's new novel, The Forgotten Waltz, is a tale of adultery unfolding over the winter of 2009, just as the Irish economy came undone. Her insight is so acute that I accuse her of having x-ray vision, seeing not the pattern of our bones, but our thoughts and deepest-held secrets.

Internal patter fascinates Enright. "I am interested in levels of brain discourse. How articulate are the voices in your head? You know, there's a different voice for the phone, and a different voice if you're talking in bed. When you're starting off with a narrator, it's interesting to think, where is their voice coming from, what part of their brain? How social is their discourse? How chatty are they? How mad?"

Without dividing her life into pre-and post-Booker, she acknowledges that the prize was a boon to her, professionally, but came between her and her readers.

"My relationship to the audience is okay again, now, but it took a while. My relationship to the work doesn't really change, and everybody's life is pretty much the same, anyway.

"There's no such thing as a life that is not normal, or, there's no such thing as a life that is not abnormal. We all have amazing lives; we all have very dull lives.

"Professionally, (the Man Booker Prize] has made a difference. But you have to be careful how you calibrate your relationship with the business end of it, because you have to maintain your vulnerability at the desk. If you become too well known or if you let the outside world encroach too much, then you won't be vulnerable at the desk."

Is she referring to the pitfall of thinking, "I won an award, therefore I must be fabulous?" Peals of laughter ensue. "Oh, I always thought I was fabulous. It was the lumpen world that wouldn't recognise me." A beat later: "I didn't say that."

Enright has this lovely habit of uttering decisive statements that she immediately denies or modifies into extinction. Or perhaps not.I sense that she's reserving judgement, letting both arguments hang in the air while we wait for events or new ideas to convince us one way or the other. For all this buzzing mental activity, Enright's work requires stillness. She reminds me that her heroine, Gina, says it's amazing how close you can get to someone just by staying very still.

"The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there. If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense. I'd had this affair in my head for a year. It's plenty of time to think, 'Ah yes, that's what happens'. You get quite close to them in that time. You let the first imagining drain away until you have something more telling, until you unlock and unlock and unlock it."

This motif of locks and keys is central, and not only because property plays a huge role in the story. Ireland, like Scotland, has an obsession with house prices. "Everyone is still obsessed. Ireland is very distinctive in that people don't pay what the house is worth, they pay what they can afford. They go to the limit of what they can afford. I love money, I'm very interested in it as a subject, and in people's attitudes to it. People say Ireland has no class system, but these characters are an entirely different class from The Gathering. I know exactly where it's set; I know exactly where they went to school - it's within half a mile of the house where I grew up. But then so is The Gathering, in some other direction."

This much-denied class consciousness was highlighted during the boom. "The nexus of money in Ireland is along the DART line you travelled on to get here. That's where the schools are and that's where people think highly of themselves. That's exactly where it happened.

"It is astonishing what has happened. My husband and I, both freelancers in the arts, were never coining it. We moved out to Bray because we couldn't afford to buy in Dublin - no-one could - and it was a good place to bring up kids.

"But anyone younger than us, in their thirties, moved out beyond. Bray is close now. People are living in Trim and Mullingar. They commute an hour or two into Dublin. They spend their lives in the car, the kids spend their lives in the crche, everybody has to have a salary, because you couldn't afford the mortgage. It's a generation living astonishingly expensive and low-quality lives."

This generation, Enright says, has been hardest hit by the economy's collapse. "So all the unemployment is out on the rim, like an hour outside of Dublin." People are finding it incredibly hard, she says. "Ireland is really bruised. Its vanity has taken an absolute dent.

"You can say what you like about the Irish. People thought 'This money is robbing the Irish soul: they used to be lovely and poor.' I never did see the connection.I thought we could be lovely and rich and wouldn't lose some essential part of ourselves."

Nevertheless, Enright finds the endless weeping and garment rending self-indulgent. "There are places a lot worse off, yet Ireland is endlessly talking about itself. We should sometimes look and say, 'Africa!', you know? As opposed to comparing ourselves to Manhattan on a permanent basis. During the boom people would say, 'Look, a three- bedroom semi in the middle of nowhere on a horrible housing estate is the same price as a duplex condo in Manhattan. Aren't we great, now we're as good as Manhattan?' "

If Ireland's boom and bust are the background of her novel, at the foreground is the relationship between Gina - very much an "Other Woman" - and San, who's married to Aileen with whom he has a daughter, Evie.

"When I was thinking about the shape of this book I went back and read Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier.

"I was looking at adultery stories. There's Madame Bovary throwing up arsenic, and Anna Karenina under the train. I didn't engage with that.

"I didn't say, I'm going to have a happy adultery story, but I was interested in how this shape usually went. I was also very interested in Lolita. The shape of it is sort of botched. The first time I read Lolita I didn't even bother with the second half. That game of two halves is a shape that I know quite intimately in my head. That shape is in (my novel] too. And also the fact that somebody falls in love with a girl who is nearly 12, except it's not the way you would expect.

"You try and do something new. I know people who have left relationships and really regretted the loss of the step-daughter, or kept up with the step-daughter, or whatever, and I didn't think I'd seen that in fiction. There are a limited number of things in fiction about the way people love. I haven't a grand statement about it, but yes, books are more limited than real life. And also, historically, more things become available to be discussed, particularly as women's lives change.

"So it's wonderful. You can just take these new things that have always been there and write about them."

She is intrigued by what we know and when we know it, and how this knowledge transforms our relationships.

"I cut a bit out of the novel where Gina says of Aileen, whose husband she's sleeping with, 'She must know.' Most of us say that all the time. There's all this stuff about denial and projection. We know all the tropes from relationships. We have people whose echoes resonate throughout our lives.

"It ties in with my interest in how we know things, which is a great historical and moral question. How do we know things? When do we know things? That is a great ongoing question in everyone's lives …"

Enright breaks off with a noise like "Smooosh," before continuing. "Too grandiose! But denial suited Ireland very well in those bubble years.You knew there was going to be a fall, but the denial got more and more frantic and quite aggressive."

Having said that she felt if she didn't write, she wouldn't exist, she's ready to recant. Although true, it was a desperate statement, she's decided.

"I feel sorry for the previous life in which I was the person who thought that. But the impulse for storytelling is ancient. Listen to a baby in a cot, babbling - that is a story. I recently wrote a thing about how the infant waiting for its mother must invent or they will be lost.

"If the child cannot invent, then there is the abyss facing him. They have to invent in order to be able to think at all. You have to have a series of images in your head."

Look at Enright and you see a ferocious, extraordinary talent. But, she says, "I have a very urgent relationship to the ordinary. I am very fond of the ordinary. I suppose it's a kind of affirmation of how we live our lives. It's also to do with this idea of transcendence, which I'm sort of against, because we spend so much of our time looking for it."

For a time, she says, when decorating fever gripped the nation, "I thought my life would be fine if I could figure out whether I wanted a granite kitchen counter top or marble or a fecking interesting kind of Formica. That was the problem. If I sorted it out everything would be okay. Then, after the Booker, we realised we probably could get a new kitchen. And then we didn't do it at all. When you can afford it, you don't really want it any longer. There's a lot of that in this novel

"And what is wanting? It's not for something you have. There's a great trick to wanting something you have. Gina says the perfect drink does exist but it's never the one you have in your hand."

She may have a point, but I assure you that whenever you have one of Enright's works in your hand, you're grasping a little piece of perfection.

• The Forgotten Waltz is published by Jonathan Cape, priced 17.99. Anne Enright will be appearing at the Word Festival, in Aberdeen, on 14 May. For information and tickets, visit www.abdn.ac.uk/word