The Gathering (Man Booker Prize) | Anne Enright

The Gathering (Man Booker Prize) | Anne Enright | Love, Anger, and Sex in a Current Novel

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The Gathering (Man...

	The Gathering (Man Booker Prize) Anne Enright Grove Press, Black Cat, 2007 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 125 reviews view larger image
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Family Roots

Veronica, the eighth of the twelve Hegarty children, travels to England to collect the body of Liam, her immediately older brother, while the other surviving members of the family gather in Dublin for his funeral. But the title is misleading. What is being gathered together in this story is not primarily the various members of the Hegarty clan (although most of them make an appearance), but a rag-bag of childhood memories as Veronica struggles to make sense of her own life and Liam's in the context of family history. She makes this clear in the opening sentence: "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." Or sort of clear; her doubts about the past are part of the point.

I had a disturbing sense of déjà vu on picking up the paperback, because the pier on the cover closely recalls another recent Man Booker winner, Graham Swift's LAST ORDERS, which is also about a gathering of family and friends to solemnize a death. And that first sentence seems to invade the territory of John Banville, whose most recent Man Booker winner, THE SEA, is also about recapturing the traumatic events of an Irish childhood. But I needn't have worried; Anne Enright's voice -- Veronica's voice -- is all her own: straightforward, witty, imaginative, yet bracingly honest, dwelling at one moment on skin and sweat, then cleansing it with gentle lyricism.

Veronica's first-person narrative jumps around over four generations. The earliest passages tell how her grandmother Ada may have met her future husband; the latest ones extend some months beyond the funeral, and relate to her own family life with a college-lecturer husband and two daughters. Several things gradually become clear. First, that much of what Veronica narrates as fact may be misremembered, reconstructed, or the wholesale products of her imagination. Second, that her main concern is to trace the causes of her brother's failures, which we begin to recognize even through the glow of her fierce love for him. And third, that Veronica herself is also in trouble, struggling with a crisis in her own life and marriage, that only the act of writing may help her to resolve.

Despite Veronica's problems and Liam's, this history of the Hegarty family is a counterpoint to the success story of Ireland during the past decades, as it has emerged from its backwater to become one of the leading engines of the new Europe. Veronica, who grew up sharing a bedroom with at least two other siblings, can now drive to an airport on a whim, present a credit card, and consider a flight halfway around the world. Anne Enright shares Penelope Lively's feeling for changing eras (as shown in MOON TIGER or CONSEQUENCES), and equals her ability to take a relatively common story and render it far from ordinary through writing that pulses with life. And her technique of using chilhood memories to reflect a whole family history reminds me of Kate Atkinson's marvelous BEHIND THE SCENES AT THE MUSEUM, my touchstone for such books. But Enright's style is very much her own, and her people are well worth knowing for their own sake. Meet them.

[I have now read a number of the mostly-negative Amazon reviews. Yes, this is a non-linear narrative, but I found that exhilarating rather than difficult. Others might be disturbed by the unreliability of the reporting, but it leads to some marvelous effects, such as the set-piece description of the meeting of Ada Merriman and Lambert Nugent in chapter 3 that is turned on its head in the last few sentences. It also makes it less a history of events than a psychological portrait of the narrator, which is surely the main point. As for the obsession with sexual organs, especially male ones, I see this in retrospect as a meaningful reflection of Veronica's trauma -- but I admit to being irritated at the time by what I took as merely a regrettable quirk of Enright's style.]

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Love, Anger, and Sex in a Current Novel

Anne Enright's "The Gathering" explores issues of family, love, loss, in the voice of a 38 year old woman, Veronica, reflecting upon the suicide of her brother Liam in a large, modern Irish family. The book is told in a stream of consciousness style as Veronica, while responding to her brother's death and handling the details of retrieving his body from England, reflects upon her life and her family. Some of her recollections, as Veronica admits in the first sentence of the book, may not be accurate as they are covered over by memory and self-interest. Veronica is thus something of an unreliable narrator, and Enright, the author, remains in the background without explicit comment.

This is a difficult book. The various Amazon reviews are thoughtful and perceptive, from those which rated the book a 5 to those which rated the book a 1. I learned something from many of the reviewers whose perspective on the book differs from mine. I came away from my reading mostly disliking the book, and the views of many of my fellow reviewers confirmed my response.

"The Gathering" has many poetical moments and beautiful turns of phrase. The narrator, Veronica, appears to make an attempt to be honest with herself. Thus in the story we hear her views about her own life, her large family, parents, grandparents and siblings, and about her husband and children. In particular, we hear a great deal about love, desire, and sex and Veronica's views of their interrelationships. Veronica is bitter and angry. The author presents her character for what she is to allow the reader to try to understand her.

The poetry and the toughness do not save the book. Most of what Veronica says is too bitter and too angry to be interesting or insightful. In fact, a great deal of it is an extreme form of male-bashing which, alas, differs only in degree from much discussion in recent years and which takes no large degree of courage to express. Veronica is obsessed with male sexuality and lust -- with the smell of a man, with the grossest details of a man's body parts, and with a man's sexual activity. She is angry with the way she feels men approach sex and this anger pervades her book far more than does the death of her brother. Her story is told through the fog of time and much of it remains elliptical. But through much of the book, the theme appears to be that women are sullied by male sexuality at least in the form in which most men pursue sex. Their characters and feelings do not meet Veronica's expectations and approval. The story includes long discussions on Veronica's grandmother, Ada, on her questionable early life, and on her relationship with her two suitors. Veronica is also obsessed with the life of her parents -- and on their large family. She attributes the large family and its difficulties to her father wanting too much sex with her mother -- as if, Veronica observes, he had a right to sex. In her own life, Veronica remembers with fondness a Jewish boyfriend from America during her college years. But she feels little for her husband and finds sex with him repellant in frequency, timing, and quality. He had the sex, she observes archly after one of their times together, I did not. Veronica also resents her husband his career success and her own leaving of the work place to raise her children. Too much of this comes off as a screed and to much of it as a rehearsal of what have become commonplaces in some quarters. While I appreciated the attempt of the book to be frank and to speak honestly about one's feelings, I didn't think the book achieved these goals. I came away not caring much about Veronica. And I had too many questions about her responses to her experiences and her insight to find her story compelling.

I was reminded in this book of a recent American novel called, coincidentally enough, "Veronica" by the American writer Mary Gaitskill. This novel, like "The Gathering" is told in a first-person stream of consciousness style. (The narrator is a woman named Allison and the title character is her friend.) Gaitskill's book is also full of tough reflections on sexuality, derived from Allison's life as a stripper and model. But I found Gaitskill's book, in which the sex is much more lurid than anything in "The Gathering," had the personal voice, the immediacy, and the sense of honesty, that Enright's book aims for but for me failed to achieve.

I struggled with "The Gathering" but couldn't bring myself to like or to recommend it.

Robin Friedman

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disappointing

I very much agree with Robin Freidman's review. The book was very well written but I did not find it enjoyable. Skip it.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

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