Oct 312012
 

The Gathering by Anne Enright

Two Stars

Read in September 2012

The Gathering was a tough read for me. It’s the story of Veronica Hegarty, a middle child of an Irish family of 12, following the suicide of the brother who was her closest sibling. Liam and Veronica were shipped off to their grandmother across town when they were children while their mother was ill, and Veronica revisits those memories in the aftermath of Liam’s death. She remains enraged at her parents, but especially her mother, for having so many children, and part of that rage stems from her stay with her grandmother. Something happened there, she thinks, that changed Liam, and the book tells of her search for that occurrence. She begins by imagining her grandparents as young adults, along with their friend, who kept his car in her grandparents’ garage. After this imagining, she sifts through actual memories until she recovers memories of abuse. Meanwhile, she’s neglecting her daughters and her husband, and she’s providing a rundown of the grievances she has against each of her siblings. The memory subplot crescendos as the family gathers for her brother’s funeral, and that’s when Veronica’s imaginings and memories fall apart. She discovers the man she remembered as the friend of her grandparents was actually their landlord. She discovers that her dead brother wasn’t the sad sack loner and loser she thought but a beloved friend, brother and nephew. The reader is left wondering if any of Veronica’s memories were real but not really caring very much about the answer because she’s such an unlikeable whiner. Veronica’s whining was the major reason the book was a tough read for me, but the constant shifting of time — now, imagining, flash back, flash forward, now, flash back, flash forward, imagining — also made it difficult to enter the novel deeply. I trudged through it, but I didn’t enjoy it, and I was left with the feeling of “meh” when it was over.

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