Review: 'The Gathering' dives into the past after a sibling dies
Published 4:00 am, Thursday, September 20, 2007
By Anne Enright
BLACK CAT/GROVE; 261 PAGES; $14 PAPERBACK
Sometimes a novel fails not because its insights ring false but because its characters did not honestly earn them. There's no climbing arch toward some final illumination, no psychic struggle, no real attention to the forces that shape ideas and worry them, before working them into hard-won "truth." Fortunately, Anne Enright finds insights a rare commodity, something to be forever pursued. And in her new novel, "The Gathering," a finalist for the Man Booker Prize this year, she's created a smart, harried, relentlessly searching narrator perfectly suited to her task.
The conditions for insight are set up in the usual manner: A character's world is upturned. As the novel opens, Veronica Hegarty has learned of the death of her brother Liam, his body found in the sea off Brighton, England, stones in the pockets of his jeans. By family pecking order, the job of informing Mammy devolves to her, now duty-bound "to tell one human being about another human being, the few and careful details of how they met their end." Her words could be addressed to us, for Liam's suicide rouses her from a routine, formless life to comb the past for answers. Yet, as she soon learns, the dead have no need for understanding, while the living hope only to forget the sins of the past - and keep their secrets buried.
Veronica's narrative is propelled by the force of her need. On the surface, the story relates how Veronica carries on after Liam's death, making funeral arrangements, seeing to her vast, sprawling family, and, at her mother's request, coordinating the wake to be held in her childhood home in Ireland. At the same time, Veronica grows increasingly detached from her domestic life. She begins staying up nights while her husband and daughters sleep, writing and doing housework, or taking rambling trips in their car. Her present life recedes as visions of the past come to haunt her.
In fitful starts, several story lines begin to take shape: fantasies of how her grandmother met Lamb Nugent, an obsessive man who held sway over her entire household - and may have set Liam on his path toward destruction; memories of her dead brother: a night spent in jail; verbal abuse from their father that came to a sudden end; and the dispiriting divide between her and Liam as drinking became "his problem." Each story spirals around a black hole of vexing uncertainty: Why did Liam leave her? How can she explain his death? And to what extent - if any - are she and her family to blame?
As the book unfolds, we meet a procession of colorful characters. There are the nine surviving Hegartys, the children who died, a mad uncle, old schoolmates, lovers. Among her siblings there is the success, the mysterious one, the ex-priest, the griper. The majority of these characters are minor, but together they exert a pressing force - nettling her, diverting her thoughts, awakening her through memory to the past and her own feelings. Describing family life, Enright evokes a bewildering jumble of emotions. At the gathering for Liam's wake, Veronica shares this pitch-perfect insight: "I watch this configuration as from a great distance. It is as though I am not related to any of them. But there is a roaring in my blood, too."
The route to truth is a slippery one, and several obstacles bar her way. Regarding the past, her family maintains a stubborn silence, whether to protect their mother's peace of mind ("Don't tell Mammy" was a persistent refrain in childhood) or preserve an appearance of normalcy. In this family, communication is genuinely impossible. With no one to help her, Veronica must turn inward, to an imperfect memory and a vivid - and unruly - imagination. "Here is my grandfather, Charlie Spillane" begins one chapter, as if she were willing him into existence. She explains her method thus:
"I do not know the truth, or I do not know how to tell the truth. All I have are stories, night thoughts, the sudden convictions that uncertainty spawns."
Because of this doubt, she allows her mind to wander, letting it take her where it will. But she also replays fantasies, backtracks, tinkers and revises - making her, on the one hand, distressingly unreliable, while on the other, both exceedingly willful and honest.
With this novel, Enright shows herself to be a clear-eyed investigator of the human condition, driven to pursue hard truths. And how can we not, at the very least, admire such a calling? But for some, "The Gathering" may seem too grim a thing to tackle, while others may find its structure too loose. To which I would say merely this: Read, and keep reading, and see if you find something startling, or heartbreaking, or perfectly true and wonderfully insightful, revealing itself on the next page.