The Gathering, by Anne Enright (2007)

After the death of her brother Liam, Veronica Hegarty tries to make sense of the ruin of his life, and her own, by remembering her and Liam's childhood, visiting the places of their shared past, and reimagining her Grandmother's life. So much of the book hit the mark perfectly, and how could I not love a book that uses Dublin words like “bockety” and “baggsed?”

However, as the narrator and only voice in the The Gathering, I eventually grew weary of Veronica. There's something so relentless about her unhappiness, which started to grate after a while. Also, the prose in which Veronica's voice is written, while brilliant, seems at times too mannered, too writerly, in a way that contrasts sharply with the terse, short snatches of spoken dialogue. The barrenness of that dialogue really throws the fecundity of the prose into relief, and maybe this is Enright making an argument about the disjuncture between the imperfect, improvised nature of speech and the studied, perfectability of the written word, but after a while it began to make the characters sound monosyllabic and disengaged, and the prose musings of Veronica too constructed.

A good book, well written, full of powerful, corporeal images of the interconnectedness of sex and death, eros and thanatos, that deals honestly and painfully with the wreckage of family secrets, and a particular moment in Irish history as the country transitioned from a barely repressed Church state into, well, something else. I just didn't enjoy it, however. There's no spark, no humour in the book. It's kind of a relentless slog through a miserable life history.