J.G.'s Review - The Gathering

It's not often that a book lies as heavily on my thoughts while I'm reading it as this one did.

Enright's tale of nine surviving siblings who have gathered for their brother's funeral, while still acting out against each other, resuming old battles and settling old scores, is searing. The novel focuses on Veronica, the "responsible sister," who bears up under her brother Liam's funeral details as best she can, while nearly-forgotten memories of childhood events come back to her, perhaps explaining Liam's suicide. At the same time, Veronica must face up to her failing marriage and her own near-collapse. All this while her dysfunctional adult family swirls around her, hardly a grown-up among them.

This family portrait shows that it's sometimes a near-miracle that we survive our families at all. And yet, even with such formative emotional marks against her, Veronica makes progress toward the kind of wholeness that adulthood is supposed to bring.

Enright writes very well, seamlessly moving her characters through space and time with a sure hand for tone and clarity. She is able to pull the bigger picture into focus with an economy of words that never draws attention to the technique itself.

All the same, while the craft is there, the subject matter is bleak and for me, not outweighed by the resolution. Truly, it's better not to have siblings, if having siblings is like this.

For more about this book, including an excerpt, please visit my blog, Hotchpot Cafe.

Athena K's Review - The Gathering

Veronica Hegarty has lost her mind and her life is a train wreck.  Her favorite brother Liam has been found dead, a suicide, at the age of 40.  Her marriage has been on the rocks, her relationships with her numerous family members range from uncomfortable to estranged, and her memory is fading or invented.  I loved this novel.

Veronica, the eighth of 12 children born to an Irish family in the mid-twentieth century, narrates her grief in a vivid, visceral and graphic way.  For a woman with so many relationships, she has almost no intimacy, except once, long ago, with her brother who is now dead.  She is overwhelmed by this loss:

"And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone.  It seems like such a massive waste of energy - and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking.  We each love someone even though they will die."

But Veronica has a secret about Liam - at least she is pretty sure she does.  Memory is such a strange beast though, she finds that if she tries hard enough she can conjure a memory about almost anything - even if she knows it couldn't have happened, or if she knows it happened to her sister and not herself.  But what she knows - that Liam was "interfered with" as a boy of 9 - she has never told anyone in the family.  This play with memory, and the "something immoral about the mind's eye" that Anne Enyeart explores through Veronica's narration is what captivated me so thoroughly.  Because the narration skips across time, and because Veronica blends fiction, memory, and the here-and-now so seamlessly, the facts surprise us even as we anticipate their telling.

It's not a comfortable book.  (I could have written this entire review on the various and creative symbolic meanings of penises in the novel, for example).  Enright doesn't shy from some of the hardest subjects I can think of: suicide, child molestation, infidelity, alcoholism.  But Veronica becomes such a real and sympathetic character that I had a hard time putting the book down. 

2007 - The Gathering

I wish I hadn't left it so long to read The Gathering, it's a very fine book. Perhaps not everybody's cup of tea because some of it is quite confronting, but I plan to read more of Enright's work.

To see my review, please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/the-gathering-by-anne-enright/, and now I've got 12 to go...

Hi Everyone!

Hello Everyone,

I am Veens and I blog at Giving... Reading A - Chance!!!

I came to know about this site through S. Krishna's post on her Booker Reading Challenge post. And I thank her for that post. I immediately joined her and decided that this would be an interesting challenge.

After failing in almost all the short-time challenges,  I think the long term challenges [ with no time frame ] will work for me :-)

Laura, thank you for inviting me to this wonderful blog. I can't believe it took me so LONG to find this blog. I wasn't looking at the right places, I am sure.

Till date, I have read just 2 Booker Prize Winners [I know sad...] -

The Gathering by Anne Enright

I read this in Oct, 2008 and didn't like it. I struggled with this book a lot, trying to make sense of what was happening to Veronica. I never wrote a review of this one, as I knew I needed to re-read it to understand it better. I think a re-read with the right set of mind will help me appreciate this book much better than I did then.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

I read this in Nov, 2008. I read my own review of it today and found it very bad, very inadequate. I admit that when I started on this book, I was hoping to be completely immersed in it, but was totally disappointed when it didn't happen. I struggled for sometime with this book too. The fact that this book revolves around people, whose ethnic background is same as mine didn't help me get into the swing of things.

But eventually, I don't know when, I was sucked into it. I was eager, sad and I was heart-broken. I could "feel" the characters and hate some. The writing is lyrical, but the book in itself is melancholy. I shed a few tears when I was finished with it!

There are so many quotes from this book that I could quote but here is a link to the review by a reviewer who has penned down some of the best quotes from the book. Here are some from my review -

It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain.To let it be, and to travel with it, as Velutha did, is much the harder thing to do!
[Page 190]

If he touched her, he couldn't talk to her, if he loved her he couldn't leave, if he spoke he couldn't listen, if he fought he couldn't win.
[Page 330]

I hope these quotes give you an idea of how beautiful her writing is. I think this is one of the most underrated books in the Booker Prize win-list. And I definitely think everyone should give it a try.

Once again, Laura thank you for letting me "in"!

And I am sure I am the one who will benefit from all the great reviews being posted here.

I have one more booker winning book "White Tiger by Aravind Adiga [ 2008 ]" in my TBR that I need to read in the coming days!

And HAPPY DIWALI to all of you!

Ann Enright: The Gathering

Oh good lord.
The blurb on this book states: "The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother Liam. It wasn't the drink that killed him - although that certainly helped - it was what happened to him as a boy in his grandmother's house, in the winter of 1968." And that is wrong, and misleading. Wrong because although there are nine of the twelve children surviving, one sister, Alice, does not make an appearance at the wake. Misleading because the gathering of the siblings at the wake takes 28 pages in a book of 261, and what happened to Liam in 1968 is never spoken of amongst the siblings.

No, this book is about how Veronica deals with the death of her closest brother.

I liked very little of this book. There is a vague chronological plot, beginning with notice of Liam's death, and ending a few months later, but at the same time as that plot proceeds, events yet in the future are spoken of, and events both in the far and recent past are revisited. And everything is clouded by both Veronica's uncertainly about what she remembers, and her fantasies about what may have happened.

At the end of the book I had the wearying feeling that never had I read so many words written about so little.

I must mention that this is yet another Booker prize winner written in my least favourite narrative style - the first person. In fact, part way through reading this book I reconsidered my plan to read all of the Booker winners, thinking that I haven't really enjoyed many that I have read. I like a damn good story that sucks me in, and spits me out at the other end so immersed in the story that it is a shock to open my eyes and find myself inhabiting my life.

Okay, thinking back, "the sea, the sea", and "The Life of Pi" have sucked me in, and "The White Tiger" came close, so it's not as bad as I am making out. I shall continue.

The Gathering - J's Review

Two years ago, I had a letter from Earnest. He was writing to tell me that he was leaving the priesthood, though he had decided to stay with his little school in the high mountains....'I have no place left to live but in my own heart,' he wrote, meaning he would conduct his life as before, but on privately different terms.

And I thought this was the stupidest stuff I had ever heard until, sitting on a stool in the Shelbourne bar, I wondered what might happen if I just carried on as usual, told no one, changed nothing, and decided not to be married after all.

And I wondered how many people around me are living with and sleeping with and laughing with their spouses on just this basis, and I wondered how sad they were. Not very, by the looks of it. Not sad at all.

The Gathering, by Anne Enright, is the story of Veronica, and her coming to terms with the suicide of her favorite brother, Liam. It is her unenviable task to travel from Ireland to England to recover his body, and bring it home for the funeral.

Veronica is falling apart following her brother's death. In addition to her grief, she harbors a secret, or at least, she thinks she does. She is hazy on her memory of an incident during their childhood, and fears that perhaps it may have been the first step toward Liam's eventual death. Her struggle with this memory, with trying to remember what did and what did not happen, and to whom, unravels her happiness and further strains her marriage. You get the feeling that she has never been a joyous person, she is too cold and critical for that, but she did have love and happiness, which are currently overwhelmed by her sadness and her memories. She is a woman in the process of falling apart.

Veronica tells the story of her family, going back to the day her grandparents first met, coming forward to her mother's passive life, and then to that of her many brothers and sisters. She harbors both love and disdain for her mother, whose 17 pregnancies, resulting in 12 children and 5 painful miscarriages, Veronica sees as proof of her mother being unwilling to refuse her father's carnal desires. That her mother might have shared these desires never seems to cross her mind.

Already a cold person, Veronica shuts down emotionally in the period following her brother's death. She resents her husband for wanting sex so soon after the death, resents him trying to prove to her that she is still alive. After that first encounter, she refuses to come to bed any more, instead staying awake all night, every night, drinking wine and waiting for him to get up for work before she herself collapses into bed.

The title of the book, The Gathering, made me think this was going to be the story of a family coming together, and of the joys and recriminations that might come to light at such a gathering. But at least 3/4 of the book is told in her meandering way, as she travels through memories and stories, while on the way to and from England on her sad task. Only at the end do we meet her siblings, and find ourselves at a surprisingly muted event.

If I were to read this review up until this point, I would think that The Gathering isn't really worth reading, and that Veronica is a character that I would not like. But Enright's writing is so beautiful, and she is able to bring you into Veronica's mind so well that you feel sympathy for her, for what she's been through, for her upbringing. You hope for her to find peace with her family again, and joy within her marriage. The end is too ambiguous for that, and I walked away feeling someone dissatisfied.

I have seen The Gathering compared to The Dubliners, by James Joyce. One big difference is that The Gathering is a novel, while The Dubliners is a book of short stories. I've only read the most famous in that book, The Dead, which is a story that touched me very deeply. The Gathering is similar in its prose and imagery, and in that the book seems to meander along until finally you get to the end, and it turns out that the end is what you were waiting for all along. In The Dead, however, that end is a beautiful respite, and a glimpse into love that is not jealous or unkind, despite the jealousy and unkind thoughts that were there moments before...a love that transcends this mortal world, however mortal the players. The Gathering offers no such great reward.

I would recommend this book to people who love beautiful, evocative writing. Enright is a gifted writer in this aspect. I would not recommend this book for anyone seeking an easy, quick read, as the twists and turns and dark subject matter make this a somewhat difficult read.

Katrina's Review of The Gathering (2007 Winner)

Lots of reviews of this book say it is too depressing, too miserable. This is a book about a suicide, its hardly likely to be full of happiness and joy.
The book is narrated by a middle aged, middle class woman, with a seemingly perfect life - she's at home looking after the kids, whilst her husbands business is going so well she can buy anything she wants. But she isn't happy.
When her brother commits suicide she starts mulling over events in the past, her past and her families past, as well as the present, her lifeless, loveless marriage. Veronica is from a large family, one where the kids all drag up each other. The mother has too many kids to care about each child individually, and she also has some type of problem, so the family is constantly trying to protect her from the live going on around her. Veronica seems to hate, and yet love her mother, and also blames her father for having to grow up in this overly large family.
After her brother's suicide, Veronica explores a past she would have never known, the meeting of her grandparents, and how that meeting led to the event that she says it the root cause of her brother's death.
This novel is firmly based in the thoughts of the narrator, no great event happens, and you guess early on what childhood event will be revealed. I felt I never knew whether to trust this narrator, at some points she even told you that she couldn't clearly remember events. I also didn't really like her, or any of her family, they all seemed fairly self absorbed, no one really seemed to love anyone else, they all just existed side-by-side.
Saying that I thought it was well written, and a good read.This was the last book I had to read for the 2008 Man Booker Challenge, this year I read:
1. The Gathering (winner)
2. The Famished Road (winner)
3. Sour Sweet (Short listed 1982)
4. Moon Tiger (winner 1986)
5. Mister Pip (Short listed 2007)
6. The Orchard on Fire (Short listed 1996)
By far my favorite was Mr Pip. In the next year I shall be reading all the of the 2008 shortlist, as well as some previous winners and runners up

Jackie's review of 'The Gathering'

This book is completely different from anything I have read before. Not much happens, but it is strangely gripping. In the past I have tried to read a couple of books which were not plot driven, and have found myself giving up on them a few chapters in. This book is different. The quality of the writing is amazing - such simple things were made really interesting, and I found myself drawn totally into Veronica’s world. There were parts where I laughed out loud, and parts that were quite disturbing.

I was slightly disappointed by the ending, as many questions were left unanswered. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, but I am glad I read it.

3.5 out of 5 stars

The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jill)

The Gathering
By Anne Enright
Completed July 7, 2008

In The Gathering, Anne Enright took a disturbing look at family dysfunction. Told from the perspective of Veronica, a 39-year-old homemaker, the readers learned the ups and downs of being part of her large Irish family, made more complicated as the family dealt with the suicide of Veronica’s brother, Liam.

Veronica’s ghosts were a large part of this novel. Veronica was the keeper of Liam’s childhood secret, and as she grieved for her brother, she had to come to terms with the tragedies that plagued him. She also had to deal with her life decisions: hiding Liam’s secret, marrying her husband, mothering her daughters, and coping with her own mother, who Veronica loved and despised simultaneously.

Enright’s writing style was seductively descriptive. I envisioned the deeply depressed Veronica spiraling out of control, frantically typing her family’s life story as she drank and escaped from her obligations. She was not an easy character to like, but Enright’s writing evoked sympathy and sadness for this character.

In addition to the manic narrative, the reader must muddle through the many phallic references and sexual metaphors that sprung up (no pun intended) in each chapter. I can’t say these themes added to the novel, but they did not appall me either. Perhaps I was too wrapped up in Veronica’s train wreck to care.

All in all, The Gathering was a decent story about being a family member and how one woman dealt with her depression in the face of a family tragedy. If you like stories set in Ireland or are a fan of Booker winners, then I would recommend The Gathering to you. ( )

The Gathering - 3M's Review

The Gathering by Anne Enright won the Booker Prize in 2007. The novel is about family relationships, grief, and memory. Veronica comes from a large family of 12 siblings (plus several stillbirths). Her closest brother Liam has just committed suicide, and as she deals with her grief about losing her brother, the event dredges up some fairly shocking childhood memories. Soon she doesn’t know how she feels about either of her families — either her childhood family or even her husband and children.

The language and scenes are shocking and graphic. The subject matter is dark and depressing. Normally, I would have predicted that I would have hated this book, and I can see why many don’t like it. But, Enright’s writing drew me in. Veronica’s voice is so brutally honest it cut through me. Definitely not for everyone, but it’s a book you think about long after you’ve finished it, and in my mind, that’s the mark of a good one.

2007, 261 pp.
Rating: 4/5

http://1morechapter.com/2008/05/15/review-the-gathering/

Trevor's Review of Enright's The Gathering

This was the only book on the 2007 Booker shortlist that I did not want to read. When it won, I was disappointed because I thought it looked too much like Banville's The Sea, and I did not enjoy my time with that book. However, I thought I needed to give The Gathering a shot. I was not pleasantly surprised.

Enright's The Gathering may have a some well written sentences, and it may be well structured both in sequence and theme, but I couldn't find the purpose? I did not feel that the structure was unique and, frankly, I'm getting tired of all of these books that are praised because of how many different ways the author can write a depressing sentence (Enright usually generates hers by showing the human being and its body at its basest). Those poetic depictions lose their impact (and really make me question the skill of the author--does she not know how to write another type of sentence?) when they are repeated line after line, page after page. There was no balance. I know that Enright was not attempting to balance this book. She admits that anyone not wanting to feel depressed should not read it. But just because she executed her intent does not make me appreciate it.

I don't shy away from depressing novels, but I at least hope feel somewhat what the narrator is feeling--in this case I did not care at all about the narrator. Her depression did not affect me, at least, not frequently enough. I recognize that this is partially a failing on my part; I really gave up on the book early and slogged my way through it. I honestly didn't think any shortlisted book was particularly worthy of Booker in 2007, but I at least found the others compelling. This one turned me off.

Though they are similar as both deal with present grief and a tragic past, this Booker is worse that Banville's The Sea. At least The Sea was written in beautiful prose. It flowed smoothly. Enright's is downright base and choppy. The only poetry is in how basely she describes sex and death with her disconnected, stiff prose. And even that runs dry after a few chapters.

The Booker judges say that they did not think this book would win when they first read it but that it is better with subsequent reads. Well, they had to read it more than once. I'm not willing to give it another try. I recognize that others enjoyed the book and felt it was very well done. But I can't get around to that view.
1 star out of 5

The Gathering, reviewed by raidergirl3

The Gathering by Anne Enright

Man Booker winner 2007

I liked this book. I've read reviews that found this depressing and miserable, but it wasn't that bad. Perhaps it's a cultural thing. My paternal descendants are all Irish, way back, but in the Maritimes, we still claim that heritage regardless of how many hundreds of years ago those poor starving ancestors left Ireland. Part of the reason is that the Irish struck together over here, like the French and the Scottish, so that my father's generation was the first to marry non-Irish. He's from a relatively large family as well, so I am familiar with the large family saga, where you are related to people and know them, while you may not actually know them at all, but having met once, you have that connection, that shared heritage.

The other reason I liked this book was the connection I felt to the narrator. She's a woman about my age (she's 39) and her life is fine, no reason to be unhappy, but she's beginning to question her life and her family. Middle age angsty stuff. Veronica recognizes that she has no reason to be unhappy, but she is spiraling downward after the suicide of her closest brother. She tries to look into her past and her brother's to see where things went wrong with Liam and herself. Her memories are all tossed together with her siblings and they were more realistic described than the minutely detailed memories that occur in some memoirs. For example, she remembers the time she was eight and staying at her grandmother's and she ate a plastic flower. The flower came out it the diaper, but she was eight, so it must have been her little sister who did that, but she thought the story was about her. Lots of real touches like that.

So in conclusion, without going into any more detail, I didn't mind the depressing stuff because I recognize it. Irish stories are often depressing (You've read Angela's Ashes? My dad recognized his childhood, to a lesser degree) and I get it. I liked the writing as well, and can see why this was the winner for the Man Booker last year. There are still some things I found a little vague, so I am looking forward to the discussion with my book group about this book. I think there is a lot to discuss after reading this book.

Laura's Review - The Gathering

The Gathering
Anne Enright
261 pages

"There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important. Your husband can feed the kids, he can work the new oven, he can find the sausages in the fridge, after all." (p. 27)

The Gathering is an intimate and painful look at grief. Veronica Hegarty's life has been turned upside-down by her brother Liam's suicide. Throughout this novel Veronica operates in a fog, disconnected from her siblings, her husband, and her children. She is barely able to function. As she reflects on her brother's life, she tries to piece together elements of their shared past, but her childhood memories are fraught with inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Liam's death also makes her keenly aware of her own less-than-satisfying adult life: "I was living my life in inverted commas. I could pick up my keys and go 'home' where I could 'have sex' with my 'husband' just like lots of other people did. This is what I had been doing for years. And I didn't seem to mind the inverted commas, or even notice that I was living in them, until my brother died." (p. 181) When did it all go wrong?

As winner of the 2007 Booker Prize, The Gathering has received more than its share of reviews. It seems to be a "love it or hate it" book, mostly because it is so bleak. This is, indeed, a very sad book. Each person seems to be lost in their own island of grief, unable to support one another. Veronica withdraws completely; her siblings are each caught up in their own childhood baggage and destructive behavior patterns. As the book draws to a close, the truth has proven to be elusive, and the future is uncertain. Those looking for neat and tidy endings will be disappointed, but I found The Gathering's stark realism to be both intense and memorable. ( )

My original review can be found here.

The Gathering

Family history, which is for the most part oral tradition, relies on memory and is therefore changeable. The Gathering by Anne Enright (fiction, 2007 Man Booker Prize winner, 261 pages) explores the relationship between memory and truth, and the possibility of multiple truths. Not in the way of Peggy Seltzer, stealing others' lives whole cloth and making them your own, but in the way that fragments of memory are stitched together, with outside details sometimes pulled in to make them whole.

As Veronica Hegarty brings her brother's body back to Ireland and her family gathers for the wake, she recounts to us her family's history and the past secrets about her brother Liam that she has kept to herself since childhood, secrets that may have tormented Liam to his eventual suicide. Veronica is an unreliable narrator--she as much as tells us so. Early on, she tells the story of her grandmother Ada's first meeting with Lambert Nugent, a meeting that is to echo throughout the generations of the Hegartys, mesmerizing the reader with the story and its possible outcomes, and then pulling out the rug with her admission that she imagined it all. The reader is left with decisions as to what is real and what is not, and whether, in the end, the reality or unreality of the stories matter.

Veronica and Liam's family is huge (12 children), with the requisite alcoholics and priests, and they tend to blend together. I was particularly intrigued by the mysterious Alice, the only surviving sibling never to arrive onstage. But the story is primarily concerned with the tight duo of Veronica and Liam, with the next stairstep, Kitty, tagging close behind, and what may or may not have happened to Liam, what Veronica may or may not have seen, when the three children stayed with Ada one year while Veronica was eight and Liam was nine.

Veronica is an angry woman, and The Gathering is one long, searing howl of rage and pain. Enright's brilliant, incisive writing for the most part overcomes the familiar territory over which this very Irish novel treads, although some of her creative touches, such as her references to bodies, living and dead, as meat, can wear thin with repetition. The book is well done, but draining. And it leaves the reader with more questions than it answers. This is a book that will stay with readers for a long time, and can lead to examinations of our own personal family histories.

The Gathering - Wendy's Review

I would like to write down what happened in my grandmother’s house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen. I need to bear witness to an uncertain event. -From The Gathering, page 1-

Anne Enright won the 2007 Booker Prize for this novel set in Dublin which centers around a woman’s long repressed childhood memories. Veronica Hegerty is one of twelve children - a large and dysfunctional family with dark and unspoken secrets. The suicide of Veronica’s wayward brother Liam provides the catalyst for Veronica’s traumatic memories to surface. Told from Veronica’s point of view and switching from past to present and back to past again, the story is a twisting tale about the reliability of long buried events and the importance of uncovering secrets. Veronica’s revelations about what happened in her grandmother’s home so many years in the past are tangled up in alternative stories fabricated by Veronica, woven together with guilt and shame.

Veronica is a cold, cynical person - angry with her mother’s passivity, confused about her brother’s choices, and ambivalent about her siblings.

Meanwhile, the train chunters through England, clicketty-clack, and Bea talks on, sitting on my dead father’s knee with a ribbon in her hair, like the good little girl she has always been, and I look at the hills, trying to grow up, trying to let my father die, ring to let my sister enter her adolescence (never mind menopause). -From The Gathering, page 43-

She is a woman struggling in a rocky marriage which is made more unstable by Veronica’s negative view of men. But, she is not all hardness and anger. Veronica’s love for her children leaps from the pages and as the novel unfolds, the reader is drawn to Veronica, wanting to understand her and make sense of her life.

Enright leaves the reader with ambiguity in the end. The facts are hazy and the outcome of all the characters’ futures are unsure.

The power of this novel comes from Enright’s fresh language and her ability to expose her characters’ faults. Time and again I found myself stunned by the searing choice of words and phrasing; the graphic descriptions; and Enright’s ability to take the reader to an uncomfortable place to drive home her point.

The Gathering is a tough book which deals with a difficult subject matter. Enright seems to purposefully set out to shock the reader - dragging her through the muck of dysfunction and pain, stirring up the sediment in the lives of the characters to reveal their souls. Written with a great deal of intelligence, unerringly true to its characters, and staggering in its scope - The Gathering is a novel which is not easily forgotten.

Highly recommended; rated 4.5/5.

2007 Winner, "The Gathering": Elizabeth's Review

The Gathering is an elegy, and it moves in the slow, measured tones of a funeral dirge, or the sad pace of the pages of an old photo album turned by someone hampered by memory. It is the story of Veronica, the middle child of a large family, whose beloved brother Liam has filled his pockets with stones and walked off Brighton Beach and into the sea. Despite its foreshadowings of shocking revelations, it is mostly a book of feeling rather than plot, one that takes us into the depths of depression and loss and grief. It is, in the end, a book about Veronica rather than about Liam, or even about the Hegartys family relations. It is about drowning, but about Veronica drowning in loss rather than Liam drowning in the Irish sea.
The book supposedly won the Man Booker prize for its language, which is clear and spare and—in the terms used by almost every reviewer, “unflinching.” What is innovative about this book, though, is not its language but its pacing. Rather than being plot driven, a rush of prose that carries us down a flowing river, it is more like a series of still photographs. Enright gives us a scene, one with the emotional tone of a grainy black-and-white picture. Her early scenes of the meeting of Veronica’s grandmother, Ada, and Lamb Nugent, are the paradigm for the rest of the novel: she describes them sitting silently in a room, giving us minute details about the pose of Ada’s hands and the clasp of her bracelet, the way her dress folds around her as she sits. You can feel the clock ticking in the stillness of the room. And then Enright moves on, not to another plot point (this is not a novel where something happens), but to another photograph, this time of the headrest of the front seat of Veronica’s Saab pitched forward over the steering wheel, or to the elastic straps of Ada’s corset, or to the garage in the back of Ada’s house where Lamb Nugent, now the landlord, works on his jalopies. We are shown grief as a slide show, with image after image clicking quietly down into the viewer as we sit in silence trying to make sense of it all.
The shocking revelation in the middle of the book, the one that is supposed to make Liam’s suicide legible, is not so shocking in this day and age. In one flash of light, we see Liam being “interfered with,” as Enright puts it in her Irish brogue, by Lamb Nugent. It’s hardly giving away the crucial point to reveal this in a review, since the idea of child sexual abuse is by now so hackneyed in film and literature to be immediately transparent the moment a “shocking revelation” is hinted at. Veronica tells us that this recaptured memory makes Liam’s life and death all make sense, but for us, it never does—how Liam dealt with what happened, what sense he made of it, and how it shaped his life’s course never come clear. The scene where Veronica sees the abuse marred the book for me, creating a cheap emotional out that both spoiled the gravity of the book and dishonored the true emotional intensity of what happens to children who are damaged in this way.
In the end, The Gathering was a beautiful portrait of grief and its movement through both the soul and the family. I was left, though, wondering why it was Booker-worthy. With its terrible Angela’s Ashes sort of cliches about Irish life, and the ultimate cliche of child sexual abuse, it seemed to rely on gimmicks to hold up the insupportable weight of its sadness.

Anne Enright wins 2007 Booker Prize

Irish author Anne Enright has won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, for her Irish family saga The Gathering ! Enright is the second Irish woman to win the prize. She has written three previous novels: The Wig my Father Wore, What are you Like?, and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch.

Read the press release on the Booker Prize website. I have added the 2007 winner to "The List" in the sidebar ...