The Irish wake has become such a familiar trope in popular culture, it takes a novel as fiercely unsentimental as Anne Enright’s “The Gathering,” recent winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize, to club the blarney out of it.
But if this book accomplishes one thing, it is certainly that. Not for the faint of heart or the determinedly upbeat, “The Gathering” treats the family epic like an autopsy. “History is only biological,” says Veronica,” the book’s manic, lyrical narrator. “What is written for the future is written in the body.”
There’s a good reason for Veronica to feel this way. As the book begins, her brother Liam, the wayward son in an Irish family of nine, has drowned himself in the sea. The job of picking up his body – and telling his story – falls to Veronica.
She begins both journeys in the present, then scissors back to the past, finding the root of Liam’s death in the courtship of her grandfather and grandmother, not to mention long buried memories from her own childhood.
Desire – and its darker cousin, rage – course through these fragments like a bloodstream. It is the lifeblood of every relationship Veronica describes, the crux of almost every scene. “Their courtship was a violent affair,” she writes about her grandparents, “… the engagement, it seemed, just an excuse to protract the sweetness, so by the time they got between the sheets they were worn out from it all and looked to their wedding night as to a final wreck.”
The title of the book suggests a gathering of evidence, a task Veronica sets to with equivocal passion. She believes, firmly, that something happened to Liam in his childhood that explains why he killed himself; what she cannot determine is whether it happened to her as well.
Enright is an intensely poetic writer, and she beautifully re-creates the slippages of memory in “The Gathering.” The novel skitters back and forth across time, in and out of Veronica’s present life, where she is racked by guilt and insomnia. Her marriage drifts, her children are so occluded by the past as to seem, occasionally, like ghosts.
Memory can be a retreat for Veronica, though, because her childhood wasn’t entirely pinched – aside from painful recollections, there are ones full of joy. Shards of her adult past, the lovers she took and the hell she put them through, flash into view in several short chapters, putting this vivid story into three dimensions.
Enright allows Veronica to give in to this welter of grief in a way that is almost transgressive, even for today’s modern heroine. The rupture Liam creates is both a vacuum and an escape hatch. She contemplates leaving her husband, her children. Veronica begins to wonder if she started her own family to correct the mistakes of the past.
Looking into the eye of this emotional chaos hardly makes for brisk reading. “The Gathering” feels like a storm, forever hovering on the horizon, which never quite breaks. The novel’s momentum gathers and then dissipates, as its reluctant narrator hesitates in the doorway of certain revelations. Sitting at her desk, writing this story, Veronica is well aware that she re-creates as much as she remembers. One imagines her furiously gathering threads to make a weave but forever finding that under certain light some turn out not be the color she wants.
In the end, the book does close with a wake. It is a powerful scene, drenched in bathos and bitterness. “Suicides always pull a good crowd,” Veronica spits. The ritual in and of itself provides no such thing as closure. But in showing us what came before – in the time between the news of Liam’s death and the gathering which follows – Enright has shown us a world of truth.
John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle. He is writing a book on the tyranny of e-mail for Scribner.
—————————————-
FICTION
The Gathering
by Anne Enright, $14
