The Gathering: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner)

Fellow novelist AL Kennedy, reviewing The Gathering for the Guardian, argued that everything Enright has written is "alive with that lovely thing - a fully realised voice: muscular, agile, sometimes witty, sometimes hallucinogenic, often dark and lyric in a quiet and horribly skillful way". Anne Enright has written a book about family, love, hate, sex, desire, generations, child abuse, and facing one's own mortality. Her character, Veronica, one of the Hegarty clan, has word of her brother, Liam's death, and she is on her way to claim his body. On her way she reminisces about the family and builds layer upon layer of the family members that we meet.Her prose is such that you are either intimidated by its mastery or drawn into the brilliance of the descriptions of the family and need to know the stories. And, the stories are there and come one by one as I said, built layer upon layer so that you finally come to know the feelings and needs of them all. Maybe too much of the feelings for some. Veronica, facing her own self shies away from her family and wraps herself in the waves of emotion that come her way. Anne Enright writes about love and sexual desire and as she says "One of the things I wanted to do in the book was explore how desire and hatred are closely bound up," says Enright. "You know, that sense that someone - usually a man - is enraged by the fact that he desires someone - usually a woman." I cannot in all honesty divulge much of the book. It must be read and devoured and instilled in the mind to set for later discussion. In Al Kennedy's review in 'The Guardian' he shares this nugget: "The chairman of the Booker judges, Howard Davies, revealed that he had spotted the brilliance of this novel when he said: "It has an absolutely brilliant ending. It has one of the best last sentences of any novel I have ever read." Al Kennedy goes on to say that "mortality becomes the ultimate definition of Love's stupidity - an outpouring of energy towards people who are always destined to disappoint, to be disappointed and, above all, who are compelled to leave us in the most devastating way, by dying. The horror and wonder of love, we are shown, is that it outlives its object." Wonderfully, Highly Recommended. prisrob 12-30-07 The Wig My Father Wore The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch: A Novel

The narrator in Anne Enright's THE GATHERING Veronica-- "an ugly enough thing I had always thought"-- Hegarty is one of nine surviving children out of twelve (with seven miscarriages) of a large Irish family. Liam, the closest sibling to her, both in age (he is eleven months older) and in affection, has died. She has the sad task of making all the burial arrangements that include telling their frail, aged mother. The surviving members of this wildly dysfunctional clan meet for a wake (the gathering) so realistic that it will break your heart. At one point the narrator says that all big families are the same. Enright has made the Hegartys (she has a dozen ways to desribe the blue of their eyes) symbolic of every large family: those the parents favored, those they didn't, the messers (Liam), the drunks, the most successful, the religious one, the mysterious one, the brightest. This family calls to mind another large family in Thomas Wolfe's 1939 novel LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL. The narrative, as the Queen would say in Alan Bennett's recent novel THE UNCOMMON READER, does not progress as the crow flies but rather meanders in and out among three generations of this crazed and in some ways doomed family. There are family secrets revealed along the way including one that may explain why some of the characters do what they do; on the other hand we cannot be sure since memory is never completely reliable. Enright's haunting prose is also often beautiful. After the birth of her daughter Rebecca, Veronica gets back her sense of smell with an "aromatic rush." At Liam's wake Rebecca must see her mother as a "mislaid giant." Veronica has larged-boned "transvestite ankles." She reminds the reader that there are so "few people given us to love. . . And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other." On the other hand, you do not always like the people you love. One of the most touching scenes out of many occurs when Veronica's old mother finally goes to bed the night that her son Liam lies in a coffin in the downstairs living room. Veronica notices that she sleeps on her own side of the bed, leaving plenty of room for a husband dead many years. Ms. Enright writes so well about what happens-- love, loss, failure, death-- in every family.

Anne Enright has created characters that resonate long after the book has been closed. Since I had the privilege of reading it in one sitting on a cross-country flight, I was able to absorb the beauty of its images, the 3-dimensional character studies, the haunting and enraging family dynamics without interruption, totally immersed in the passions and histories of Veronica and her family. This book is written in a meaty, organic style, rare to find (e.g., "There was something about the smell of us growing up that drove (our parents) completely insane." and "The ground is boiling with corpses, the ground is knit out of their tangled bones.") The plot should not be revealed in a review but allowed to unfold in the reader's imagination. It is a complete, masterful work.