Anne Enright’s The Gathering might have vanished into the publishing landscape like so many other thousands of literary novels destined for remainder stands and a few fervent reviews (or possibly not, in this time of the disappearing book review). Instead, thanks to that much maligned prize, the Man Booker, it was given an enormous wallop up the mountain and found its way to many a personal bookshelf, including mine.

 

Reading The Gathering is very much like making one’s way across a bog; an apt metaphor for an Irish novel mucking its way through the past and the thick, preserved layers of family. I found myself slogging through its brief but dense chapters, stopping from time to time to marvel at the precision and cut of Enright’s sentences: “I think you might call it a crime of the flesh, but the flesh is long fallen away, and I am not sure what hurt may linger in the bones.” The power of the novel builds inexorably, burrowing into and out of an inevitable darkness focused on family–the Hegartys, twelve children born living, three now dead and father also, mother vague and only approximately alive. It is sibling Veronica’s story, first-person and powerful, told beginning with the suicide of her brother, Liam, whose old tragedies haunt Veronica and cause her to write both that which is imagined and, finally, that which is known, the harder truth. Veronica’s voice envelops the reader as she reimagines the past–the way that her grandmother, Ada, met both her husband, Charlie, and the man who was to mark the Hegartys in ways always hidden, Lamb Nugent. Submerged in the possibilities of the past, Veronica pulls away from her husband and her two girls, going for long drives through the night, writing out the “clean, white bones” of her story, unable to sleep next to her husband (the night of Liam’s wake, they have sex and she feels “like a chicken when it is quartered”). There comes a time, though, when those imaginative acts about Ada, Charlie and Lamb’s past must fall away in the face of “real events” which have “real effects.” What the story has to say about forgiveness left me unsatisfied, and wanting more–the grandfather and father fade away, the grandmother stands to the side and is not made by Veronica to shoulder the blame, nor is anyone else in any definitive way besides the mother who could not save her children. This vagueness about forgiveness and blame says something both about the space between generations (easier to forgive the grandmother but not the mother) and about the diffuse nature of evil acts that are kept secret and deemed “of little account.” It also says a great deal about a time when such acts where ignored, and the consequences of that blindness (madness, endless childbearing, suicide). Universal in many ways, this is also a novel very much grounded in a particular place, Ireland, and a time–the 1920s of Ada’s marriage, the 1960s-70s of Veronica’s childhood. Ironically, this novel about the trap of family at the same time upholds the “we” of family, the power of its closeness intimately linked to the cruelties inflicted by sibling on sibling, parents on children. It is “we Hegartys” that Veronica always falls back upon, the similar ways they love and look, the roles they were assigned to play and what has followed them into middle age. As Veronica notes about large families, “There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered with, as a child. There is always a colossal success, with several houses in various countries to which no one is ever invited. There is a mysterious sister.” Yet along with the darkness and the fulfillment of roles comes the strength of brothers and sisters bonding, with and over each other (at the funeral, several remark on a sister, Ita, how she’s “had a job done on our nose”). Enright’s ear for dialogue is spot-on, and is often acutely humorous and moving, such as in this telephone call between Veronica and her daughter, Emily: “‘Mummy?”Yes, sweetie.”I give you a word,’ she says. ‘And that word is “love.””Yes,’ I say finally. ‘Yes. That’s a good word to give.”Bye bye!’ And to save me the bother, she slaps down the phone.” Combining this humor and descriptive power of the everyday with deeper and pointed sentences about family and its uses, Enright succeeds in creating a novel of remarkable lasting power, similar for me to McEwan’s Atonement, though each author has their own indelible voice: McEwan’s beautifully constructed sentences and narrative that builds to a devastatingly emotional peak; Enright’s blunter, heavier phrases that scrape at your heart. (If I read more of Enright, I suspect I would find that, like McEwan, I admire her work more than I love it–which is to say, I think it is amazingly good, but it wouldn’t make the cut for my desert island.) In the end, as is true for us all in some way, it is family that saves and destroys; and it is the promise of new generations (Liam’s son, Veronica’s daughters) that carries us forward to new kinds of stories. Buried in darkness and the questions of what can be remembered and how, The Gathering proves how essentially redemptive the power of storytelling can be, how it can help define our lives and make them survivable.

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