Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way

Last month I reviewed Anne Enright's most recent novel, Actress. I thought it was so terrific I looked up her novel The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. I don't know what it was competing against, but it is, in my opinion, another terrific novel. 

The Gathering is narrated throughout by Veronica Hagarty, the 38-year-old wife of Tom, Dublin resident and native, mother of two girls, and a middle child among of a dozen Hagarty children. Her next-older brother Liam has killed himself by walking into the English Channel off Brighton, England, with his pockets filled with stones. Liam is eleven months older, which suggests something about the family, as does the mother's seven miscarriages. 

The clan gathers in Dublin for Liam's funeral, thus the title. And that, essentially, is the plot: Liam dies, Veronica collects his body, there's a funeral. So how does Enright fill 261 pages?

With razor-sharp details and an unrolling family history that is unique and universal. Examples chosen at random of the first: 

—She puts her hand on the bakelite handle [of the kettle] as the bubble thicken against the chrome, and she lifts it, still plugged in, splashing some water in to heat the pot. 

—I liked the curve to his top lip, and the way his suit hung open as he leaned over to talk to me, the dent in his chest as he stooped, the mixture of arrogance and inclination.

—We had a double act about Ernest's ordination, the horrible yellow soles of his feet as he lay prostrate on the altar, the sight of our mother, when all the voodoo was done, tottering across to dress him in his robes, and then later, at a sort of wedding reception, the two of them cutting the cake together, my brother and my mother, and kissing when it was done.

—[Her brother Mossie] didn't mind sitting with us, he said, and we could talk as much as we like, but he would not abide the noise of the foot being mashed up in our mouths, and any slurps, even the slightest squelch, would get you a thump across the side of the head.

The Gathering is a family chronicle, possibly true, possibly invented. It is a novel after all, so presumably it's all invented. Yet Enright does her best to persuade us that what we're reading is true. (I wonder how we would respond to the book if the author were 'Veronica Hagerty'?) Enright does this by questioning her own narrative. The book's first sentence reads, "I would like to write down what happened in my grandmother's house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen." We have an unreliable narrator who acknowledges up front that she may be unreliable.

Nevertheless, Veronica is engaging, dependable (she sows wild oats but is faithful to her husband), intelligent. With Liam's death, she is trying to make sense of her life as an individual, as a sister (Liam was her closest sibling, although by the end she could barely tolerate him), as a wife, and as a mother. "I do not want a different life," says Veronica at the book's end. "I just want to be able to live it, that's all."

Lucky are the readers who live with her for the 261 pages of The Gathering.