The Gathering

Skimming through the reviews that have preceded mine I find myself amused by the passion this book has generated. It seems safe to warn any prospective reader that one thing is certain: you will either love or you will hate this novel. The passionate negativity The Gathering has generated is telling, and is I believe due in part to the uncomfortable depths it brings the reader. Enright's book is not a comfortable read. Her book is about Human emotion. She explores her subject with an unflinching directness and power that left this reader unable to tolerate more than a few pages at a time. The plot is of minor importance, really only a literary device allowing the author a framework within which to do due her real work. The novel uses the death of a sibling and the gathering together of an extended family as a vehicle to explore the intense emotions and distant memories these events provoke in the central character. This Enright achieves with brilliance. She has a seemingly magical talent for using language to evoke in the reader a sense of her character's physic experience with all its ambiguity, ambivalence, and irrationality. Emotion is messy stuff and Enright does not shy away from the refuse and detritus. She takes us into the mist strewn land of child hood memory deftly exploring the boundary lands between reality and fiction. Don't expect definitive answers or tidy explanations for what "really" happened. If you are hoping for certainty at the end of the novel you will be disappointed. This is not an easy read. The comments from reviewers bragging about how they read the book in one sitting left me shaking my head. This book is not for the reader who can only give it 2 hours or for the reader who reads 100+ novels a year. It took me 3 weeks to read, and even then I felt that I needed to re-read it from start to finish if I expected to appreciate its full richness. I will admit that I did struggle at times with where Enright was taking me. There were a number (not many) of times when I simply had to move on because I could not follow her. But because of the richness and truth of the rest of the book I assumed that my failure to take meaning from these passages had more to my own failings as a reader than to the writer's "self-indulgence". I also did not find the novel "disjointed" as many reviewers have complained. I found the shifts between present and past seamless and close to my own experience of consciousness. Please, if you commit yourself to reading this book, take your time, taste and digest each word, each sentence, one at a time, and ride with the emotions that this writing evokes.

This is the kind of book that you feel you are friends with the narrator... I loved it.

I read this book slowly. I had to. If I had not, the pain would have been insurmountable. Even so, the pain was there, a dull throb. <br /> <br />If you have ever grieved (which we nearly all have or will at some point in our lives), then this book will speak to you. Directly, honestly. If you have ever grieved a family member, one you remembered as a child, then this book will speak to you. If your family has secrets, then this book will speak to you. If you have loved and lost, then this book will speak to you. <br /> <br />Basically, I can't imagine an adult who would read this book and not find some connection within. Can't imagine who would not experience a moment of "ah ha" as she read. <br /> <br />On the surface, it's a book about grief (a sister for her brother), but beneath there is a lifetime of grieving. Veronica has witnessed much and even that which she has not witnessed, she feels she knows. As she moves through the layers of her life, she shows us how her family fell apart, came back together, fell apart, came back together. For what else is there in a family but the pushing away and the pulling back close? <br /> <br />And in Veronica's large family, we are able to see our own. <br /> <br />Maybe I'm wrong and this book will make no sense to you. Even so, the writing is a glory to behold as is the story it uncovers.