The Gathering by Anne Enright

A crowd of siblings gathers in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother in this “stunning” novel by the award-winning author of Actress (The Washington Post). The surviving children of the Hegarty clan are gathering for the wake of their wayward, alcoholic brother, Liam, drowned in the sea after filling his pockets with stones. He is the third of the twelve Hegarty siblings to die. His sister, Veronica, collects the body and keeps the dead man company, guarding the secret she shares with him—something that happened in their grandmother’s house in the winter of 1968. As prize-winning author Anne Enright traces the line of betrayal and redemption through three generations, her distinctive intelligence twists the world a fraction and gives it back to us in a new and unforgettable light. The Gathering is an “wonderfully elegant and unsparing” epic of an Irish family (Los Angeles Times)—a novel about love and disappointment, how memories warp and secrets fester, and how fate is written in the body, not in the stars. “Entrancing...a haunting look at a broken family stifled by generations of hurt and disappointment, struggling to make peace with the irreparable.”—Entertainment Weekly “A melancholic love and rage bubbles just beneath the surface of this Dublin clan, and Enright explores it unflinchingly.”—Publishers Weekly “Her sympathy for her characters is as tender and subtle as Alice McDermott’s; her vision of Ireland is as brave and original as Edna O’Brien’s. The Gathering is her best book.”—Colm Toibin “Hypnotic.”—Booklist (starred review)

I can see the reviews are polarized. I'm only about 40 pages in, but suspect its my kind of book. I'm loving it. We're reading it for next month's book club and it will interesting to see how the group responds to it.

Finished it. I suspect not everyone in the book club will, but I thought it an very interesting book with the layering narrative.

Human memory is deeply fallible. Do enough research into it, and you too can continually be horrified at the credibility of eyewitness testimony. We think of memories as files in a cabinet or videos that can be played on demand, but in actuality they're as malleable as clay. The unreliability of memory is key to Anne Enright's The Gathering. In it, Veronica Hegarty is reuniting with her large family in Ireland for the funeral of one of her many siblings...Liam, with whom Veronica was particularly close. She meditates on her current unhappiness while also trying to figure out her brother's, who died from alcoholism, and to what extent the way their lives have turned out is rooted in a hazy memory from their childhood.

To explain what might have happened, Veronica spins stories about her grandparents. She does not know to what extent any of them might be true, but she's desperate to explain the complex bonds between them that might shed light on what occurred later, when she and Liam were living with them. In the meantime, her own marriage is struggling to survive, and going back home and dealing with all of her relatives again further stresses her. It's a portrait of a woman at a loss, trapped in her own ruminations, needing a path forward but (to borrow a line) borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Anyone who's wondered if we can ever really escape from ourselves and our pasts will appreciate Enright's work here. Her language is lush and evocative, and Veronica's struggle to understand her family history and her own life is rendered powerfully. That feeling of childhood memory, the way the details get harder to recall the more we try, and the challenge of trying to extract meaning from it is also captured poignantly. Veronica's heartache feels real, wanting neither to fall into the easy trap of blaming everything on family but unable to figure out how much blame to assign where.

While I appreciated aspects of Enright's craft, I did not like this book. It's often confusing to read, moving back and forth in time without clarity. When we're introduced to Veronica's imaginings about her grandparents' early lives, it's not clear until later on that these are rooted in nothing more than her own imagination. And while I'm no prude, I have never read a book so fixated on describing erections in my life and hope I never do again. While it kind of made sense, based on what's revealed over time, it was awkward and honestly unnecessary. It took me out of the book entirely. And although it's less than 300 pages long, the book honestly feels like it's been puffed out and was in real need of editing. Usually the Booker is a good list for me in terms of books I'm likely to enjoy reading, but this one just did nothing at all for me. I do not recommend it.

Although occasionally difficult to follow, the language of this novel is beautiful and rewarding. The story is dark and disturbing, revealed as the narrator, Veronica, peels back layers of repressed memories.

What a strange strange novel. I find it difficult to believe that this is a Booker Prize winner (I hold this prize in very high esteem, but I am afraid this time it let me down). I found the narrator's preoccupation with sex (especially her own family's) and genitals rather disturbing. Almost the entire first half of the novel involves her imagining how her grandparents met and did or didn't shag! And if that isn't enough, at one point she thinks about her dead baby brother and imagines how he is having little cherub sex in heaven - umm, icky!

Occasionally there is a glimpse at the kind of book this could have been (and I suppose why it won the booker prize), when Enright delivers the most beautiful and powerful prose. However, this is few and far between. As for the plot, well, it is nothing new. Why would a man grow up to be a damaged alcoholic? Take a guess and you will probably be right.