The Gathering

Categories: Award Winners , Staff Picks , Fiction

You don’t really need me to tell you about Anne Enright’s The Gathering, since it won this year’s Booker prize.  But I just read it in one big gulp, and I can’t resist telling you how gorgeous it is.  And I have another book to suggest while you wait for your copy to be available.

The Gathering is a story of family and memory.  An Irishwoman mourns her brother’s suicide while calling up the intensely tangible memories of him and their childhood and youth together, memories that coalesce around the year they spent living with their grandmother and what happened to them there.

Enright writes so beautifully, so specifically, evoking the dense physicality of memory and family emotions, that readers will be seduced with every perfect word and scene. 

Veronica Hegarty is the responsible, well-to-do daughter of her family, married to a businessman (not always happily, but as she recognizes, hate is sometimes part of love), with two perfect young girls of her own.  Her brother Liam was one of the failures of their big clan, a charming drunk and wanderer.  Yet they were the closest allies among the twelve brothers and sisters, and it’s she who’s bringing his body back from Brighton, where he drowned himself.

This means coming back into the messily close Hegarty family, too, dealing with her maddeningly vague mother, jostling among her remaining brothers and sisters, getting through the whole painfully impossible wake and funeral.  It also means revisiting old family memories and stories to try to understand why her brother killed himself. 

Those stories take her back another generation, to the life of her grandmother, whose choices echo through the lives of her children and grandchildren in unexpected ways.

This sounds grim, but it’s a lovely, lovely book.  The vivid sensuality of Enright’s writing and her compassionate understanding of the subtle ways in which families interact draw the reader deeply into the story. 

The book it reminds me of is Trezza Azzopardi’s The Hiding Place, another emotionally intense novel of family memory.  That novel is narrated by Dol, the youngest child of a poor immigrant family in Wales.  Fostered away from her family at an early age, she can barely remember her childhood till family circumstances bring her back home as an adult. 

Enright’s book is sweeter and more hopefully redemptive than Azzopardi’s heartrending novel.  But both are compelling and stunningly written, and you won’t forget either one soon.