BOOK REVIEW - Irish eyes, American influence - The Gathering A Novel Anne Enright Black Cat/Grove Press: 272 pp., $14 paper
Anne Enright is part of a remarkable generation of Irish writers who have helped transform their country's literature as surely as globalization has transformed their nation's economy. In some ways, the process has been remarkably similar -- an enthusiasm for and immersion in foreign influence carried home to make Ireland's insularity no more than a geographic fact, at last.
Like her contemporaries John Banville and Colm Toibin, Enright has been particularly frank about the influence of American writers -- particularly Don DeLillo, in her case -- on her work. In fact, when he came to praise "The Gathering" as the finest of Enright's four novels so far -- which it surely is -- Toibin adjudged her style "as sharp as Joan Didion's; the scope of her understanding is as wide as Alice Munro's; her sympathy for her characters is as tender and subtle as Alice McDermott's. . . ."
High praise from a writer immune to Celtic extravagance, but others share the opinion, since "The Gathering" is on the shortlist for this year's Man Booker Prize, which will be awarded later this month. It would be a worthy winner, since Enright has written a wonderfully elegant and unsparing novel that takes the old Irish subjects of family dysfunction and the vagaries of memory into territory made fresh by an objectivity so precise it seems almost loving in its care.
Veronica Hegarty is a prototypical new Irish wife and mother, prosperous with two small and loving daughters, a devoted husband, a suburban house with a new Saab in the driveway. Her own sprawling family is another matter entirely. Veronica is one of 10 living Hegarty children; two have died and seven miscarried in the womb. Her ineffectual father is long dead and her mother has receded into what seems a haze of post-procreative trauma. All of this is brought forcefully to the fore when Veronica's favorite sibling, the alcoholic Liam, fills his pockets with rocks and walks into the sea at Brighton in one of his wasted life's few well-planned, successful exercises.
From the moment she undertakes to tell her mother what has occurred, through Liam's funeral and its personally traumatic aftermath, Veronica's memories -- and life -- slowly dissolve into what might be called a haze of understanding, as she tries to work out her own past and that of her family. Liam and Veronica had grown particularly close and had come to share a corrosive secret while living for a time with their grandmother Ada, and as she pursues her own and Liam's pasts, Veronica interweaves a half-imagined account of her grandmother's life and of its intersection with her own.
