Anne Enright's "The Gathering"

I finished reading Anne Enright's "The Gathering," winner of the Man Booker Prize for 2007, last week. Since previous winners of this major literary prize, which is rewarded annually to a full-length novel written by a citizen of the Commonwealth or Republic of Ireland, have included "The Inheritance of Loss" by Kiran Desai, "The Sea" by John Banville (one of my favorite books of all time), and "The Line of Beauty" by Alan Hollinghurst, my expectations for Enright's novel were high.

I confess that my initial reaction was tepid. Enright's writing is engaging, lyrical, and thought-provoking, but the subject matter itself kept prompting me to indulge a peevish desire to shout "Oh, get over it, for God's sake!" The story contains all of the classic elements of the "dysfunctional Irish family memoir:" too many children, too little space, exhausted parents, alcoholism, suppressed sexual memories, suicide, family rivalries and secrets, untimely deaths, and a jigger of vaguely malevolent Catholicism for good measure.

Since the main character of the book appears to have escaped her childhood situation unscathed -- she is financially secure, healthy, married to a decent husband, and the mother of two delightful girls -- I couldn't help but wonder why she would choose to immerse herself in negative memories. ("Stop picking at that scab," as my mother always said, "or it will never get better.")

I decided to give Enright's novel a second chance after listening to an engaging interview with her about her book (find it HERE). The novel begins as Veronica Hegarty prepares to accompany the body of her beloved but hapless brother, Liam, to Ireland for burial. Liam's death was a suicide -- he walked into the sea near Brighton -- and the shock of the event has propelled 39-year-old Veronica into a kaleidoscopic quandary regarding her childhood past, her troubled family, the mysteries of love, and a burgeoning midlife crisis.

During the course of Enright's interview, she states that the natural consequence of a crisis is the universal urge to somehow "make sense of it all." This is accomplished by using our memory (an elusive and faulty tool at best), imagination and creativity to fashion a narrative that explains, if not justifies, a tragedy. All of Liam's nine surviving siblings are shocked by his passing, but Veronica bears a unique burden. She was Liam's closest friend and confidant, and she believes she witnessed an event in their shared past that could explain Liam's alcoholism and mental decline -- an event that she has suppressed and shared with no one for decades. The narrative that she fashions to "make sense of it all" is dark, beautifully rendered, and full of contradictions that she must acknowledge and grapple with before she can embrace her future.

Enright's brutally honest exposition of Veronica's conflicted emotions carried the book for me. Veronica loves her siblings, but at the same time, she will never forgive her parents for having so many children. She is devastated that Liam is dead, but she is also relieved. She mythologizes her beautiful grandmother, Ada, but she also longs to point a finger of blame at her. She loves her mother -- a woman who became successively "vaguer" with each of the twelve children and seven miscarriages she endured -- but at the same time she hates her for being so compliant, so willing to lose herself in her family. Veronica loves her husband and two daughters, but she wants to escape them, too. She knows them intimately, and yet fears they are complete strangers. These internal battles strike a chord with any reader who is capable of honest self examination, and Enright's prose peels the skin of this human predicament with exceeding skill.

Enright also explores the conflicts inherent in desire: it can be glorious, it can be destructively naive, it can be actively evil. There are as many varieties of desire as there are kinds of people, and Enright understands that we are often powerless to choose the people we are swept together with in the stream of life, be they our family, our friends, or our lovers. They happen. They just are.

In retrospect, this was a good book, especially upon a second reading.