I heard about the Irish author's surprising award of the 2007 Man Booker Prize while studying in Dublin this fall. Enright, a Dubliner herself, has written three other novels in addition to many essays, short stories and the compilation of essays, "Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood" (2004).
Her short story "Natalie" appeared in The New Yorker's Winter Fiction issue and her writings have also appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, The London Review of Books, The Dublin Review and The Irish Times.
I'll admit how egotistically I delighted to find, early in the book, the narrator's comment: "This is what they were like, the Americans at college in Dublin -- clear and loudish and interesting, at least to themselves. Maybe it is what we were all like, though no one wore long-sleeved T-shirts under short-sleeved T-shirts in our day." True enough.
I can't say my nostalgia for that mild and charming place didn't figure in as well. While I highly recommend this, Enright's fourth novel, I don't advise you to breeze through it self-indulgently.
The novel shadows the 39-year-old Dubliner Veronica Hegarty through the psychological adjustment after her brother Liam's suicide.
Alternating between the dense, sensual representations of her present life as housewife and mother and the uncertain reconstructions of both her childhood and her grandmother Ada's married years, Veronica first addresses herself to the page as an author struggling to write her story, in order to sort through the disarray of losing the sibling she loved best, "deciding on the one story that would explain us all."
Soon Enright erases this frame and puts us in immediate contact with Veronica's drifting imaginings, keeping us always mindful of their probable inaccuracy. She desperately wishes she could change the facts of her brother's life, but instead she reconfigures the fragmented anecdotes on which she bases her grasp of her own past and the collective past of the Hegarty family.
After remarking how her brother will sleep off this last hangover for a very long time, Veronica forces this realization on herself: "The truth. The dead want nothing else, it is the only thing that they require." It is perhaps because she associates death and truth so closely that she avoids committing to facts up until this moment.
Hypothesizing about her grandmother's infidelity with the closest family friend, Veronica tells herself that "Nothing would be changed by it; neither the future nor the past."
Eventually revealing the secret that her marriage-threatening guilt hinges upon, Veronica weaves intricate and doubtful fictions through three generations. Slowly and tentatively disclosing just how little she knows for certain in the family history of her large Irish clan, Veronica frequently admits the shaky status of the "facts" on which she bases her rationalization of Liam's suicide.
Her breakdown after losing Liam may be completely unfounded, as she bases the collapse of all the trust within her family on a moment she may or may not have witnessed at age eight.
Enright keeps potentially morbid subject matter fresh with the originality of her language and bite of her observations. "The Gathering" stands out among the many contemporary novels dealing with loss, making the characters relatable despite, not because of, their suffering.
