Take the green road on a rewarding journey

Anne Enright's 2015 novel The Green Road, is the story of an Irish family, Rosaleen Madigan and her four children; Constance, Dan, Emmet, and Hanna. 

The first chapter is set in 1980 in Ardeevin, County Clare, an invented town, and told from twelve-year-old Hanna's point of view. We are introduced to the family and the crisis when Dan announces that he wants to be a priest, sending Rosaleen to her bed in tears.

The next chapter is dated 1991, sent in New York, and is Dan's. He has barely admitted he's gay and we're in the middle of the AIDS epidemic. This chapter, unlike Hanna's, is narrated by an unidentified observer; it begins, "We all thought Billy was with Greg . . . ." We who? But we're with Dan and his lovers.

Next it's 1997 in County Limerick and Constance's point of view. She is married to a successful businessman, has three children, and a lump in her breast. We learn about her relations with her husband, her parents, and her siblings as she visits a clinic to establish that the lump is benign.

Now it's 2002 in Ségou, Mali, and we're with Emmet. Ségou is a town and an urban commune in south-central Mali on the River Niger. (I had to look it up.) He and Alice, the woman he lives with, work for NGOs. "Alice was working on child mortality. Children were hard." Mali is also hard: "Thousands of miles on dust roads, and gravel roads, and potholed tarmac: roads that turned into rivers, or forest, or crowded marketplaces; roads you drove beside because the road was so bad."

In 2005, back in Ardeevin, we're with Rosaleen who is now seventy-six, her husband long dead. It's November and Rosaleen is writing Christmas cards. Dan in Canada, Emmet in Africa. Hanna in Dublin. Constance visits to drop off groceries. There is mother-daughter tension, and Rosaleen silently tells her: Lose some weight. "It was very aging—fat. It made her daughter look like an old woman, which was a kind of insult, after all the care that was put into the rearing of her." 

And after Constance has left and Rosaleen considers the house, the furnishings (her own parents' marriage bed remains upstairs), and the family, she decides to sell the house. Which brings the four children, spouses, grandchildren back to the house for Christmas.

It's a fraught holiday. Emmet "could see the next couple days stretch out in front of them. There would be much talk about house prices, how well Dessie McGrath [Constance's husband] was doing, what everything was worth these days—more expensive than Toronto, Dan, yes, that cowshed down the road. Emmet would start an argument with Constance about the Catholic Church—because Constance, who believed nothing, would not admit as much in front of her children who were expected to believe everything or at least pretend they believed it, just like their mother. Hanna would have a rant about some newspaper critic, their mother would opine that these people sometimes knew what they were talking about, and on they all would go. It was, Emmet thought, like living in a hole in the ground."

One could read the first four chapters as short stories, linked by family connections but separate in time and place. They make up Part One, "Leaving." 

Part Two, "Coming Home," takes place in 2005, and the chapters are identified by location: Toronto, Dublin, Shannon Airport, County Dublin, The Green Road ("a real road that runs through the Burren in County Clare)—except when they're not.

Enright is able to somehow make Rosaleen and her children both individual and engaging—flawed but sympathetic, even Hanna who is an alcoholic and careless. Enright doesn't emphasize it, but 2005 was almost the peak of the Irish boom. She writes about significant events in her characters' lives with details that build and build and build until they come not to a conclusion, not to a comforting wrapping-up but a rich and satisfying ending. 

I'd like to know how she does it.