NovelWorld

This year’s surprise Booker-winner is a surprise in more ways than one. It’s a cocky, sure-of-itself, in-your-face literary experience that’s bracingly honest and frequently roaringly funny on the least funny of subjects: a funeral. It’s not the plot that’s dazzling. The story itself is hardly more than a pretext: Liam Hegarty’s suicide at the age of forty draws his nine surviving brothers and sisters back to the old over-extended family home in Dublin.

Thirty-nine-year-old narrator Veronica Hegarty was always close to Liam, and wants to tell you about her brother’s death, and in particular about something that happened when she was eight and Liam was nine (or, at least, could have happened, or maybe didn’t happen at all), but to do so she has to go all the way back to 1925, and the meeting of Veronica’s grandmother, Ada, age nineteen, with the mysterious, enigmatic Lambert Nugent in the foyer of a Dublin hotel. It’s love at first sight. Does Ada marry Lambert? No. Instead she marries his best friend, Charlie Spillane, who drives up with a flashy car outside. Thus, according to Veronica, her brother’s fate is set in motion. What this has to do with Liam’s death is the mystery.

Don’t expect to find out what really happened in grandmother’s house. Memory in Enright’s hands is even more treacherous and unreliable than in Proust’s. Veronica gives you all kinds of variant possibilities, but that’s all they are, contradictory interpretations of the past, fallible guesswork.

Author Enright has a fine time entertaining you, with a spunky irony to the writing style, an exuberance in the language, a sly wisdom underlying the twists of the narrative. Her tale is pull-no-punches honest about the unfairness and disappointments of life, but playful enough to include a sex scene that didn’t really happen. It’s a thrillingly honest and unsentimental look at the human experience, with plenty of defiant Irish laughter in the face of mortality.

Dotted with deadpan gems, every page seasoned with Enright’s irrepressible spirit, The Gathering is a tribute to the family funerals of life, where grief is “somewhere between diarrhea and sex.”

(originally posted on Shelf-Awareness.com)