The Gathering, by Anne Enright (2007)

It was hard for me to read this book with any sense of distance. So much of The Gathering resonates strikingly with my memories of my large extended family that, in the end, I found the book to be both perfectly truthful and a little bit irritating.

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 only voice in the book, I eventually grew a bit weary of Veronica. It’s just that there's something relentless about her unhappiness, which started to grate after a while. Also, Veronica’s prose, while brilliant, seemed at times too mannered, too writerly, in a way that contrasted sharply with the terse, short snatches of dialogue. The barrenness of the 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 studied.

But, 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. But, having grown up around people a lot like Veronica and her family, maybe my patience for them was always going to wear a bit thin? Hardly Enright's fault.