The Gathering
Anne Enright
Grove Press, 2007
U.S. trade paper, reprint
ISBN 978-0-8021-7039-2
260 pages; $14.00

The winner of the Man Booker Prize in 2007, The Gathering is one of the angriest novels I have ever read. It’s not entirely clear exactly what Veronica Hegarty, the narrator of the novel, is so angry about, because there is such a rich smorgasbord of things possible causes for: the lack of attention paid to her throughout her life by her mother, who usually cannot even remember her name because her time and attention has been divided among 12 children and shredded by a total of 19 pregnancies; a husband who might be cheating on her, who might be acting the loving husband instead of actually being a loving husband; the very fact that she is female, and therefore has been subject for her entire life to the whims of men and the confusions of being a woman during the second half of the 20th century, when what it meant to be a woman was undergoing genuine change. But one cause seems to predominate: Veronica’s brother Liam, a mere 11 months older than she, has just committed suicide.

This saga of an Irish family begins with Veronica’s grandmother, Ada, who meets Lamb Nugent in the foyer of a hotel in 1925. Ada is there about a job; Lamb works behind the desk. Nugent falls in love with Ada from the moment she twitches her gloves off with precise movements:

It has already happened. It happened when she walked in the door; when she looked about her, but only as far as the chair. It happened in the perfection with which she managed to be present but not seen. And all the rest was just agitation: first of all that she should notice him back (and she did – she noticed his stillness), and second that she should love him as he loved her; suddenly, completely, and beyond what had been allocated to them as their station.

It comes as a shock after Veronica tells this story, all in precise, careful, lovely language, each moment so vividly recalled in her imagination that the reader can’t help but picture the hotel lobby, the 19-year-old girl and her admirer, to learn that Nugent does not become Ada’s husband. Instead, Ada marries Charlie, Nugent’s best friend, a man constantly nipping out to “see a man about a dog” and to gamble – a man bad with money, but who adores Ada and whom she adores as well. And Lamb? He is there, with his wife and his four children, and he is the landlord for the Hegarty family. And he never stops loving Ada. And he gets his revenge.

But what does that have to do with Liam, and Liam’s suicide, and Veronica’s anger? For her anger goes beyond the place it would have as one of the stages of grieving; it extends to her living brothers and sisters, her mother, her husband, even, seemingly, to Ireland itself. This book glows red with anger:

I know that these men [men with easy hearts] exist, I have even met them, it is just that I could never love one, even if I tried. I love the ones who suffer, and the love me. They love to see me sitting on their nice Italian furniture, and they love to see me cry.

And I know how silly it is. You don’t kill someone by having sex with them. You kill them with a knife, or a rope, or a hammer, or a gun. You strangle them with their tights. You do not kill them with a penis. So it is all – the I hate you, I love you, I hate – a dream of killing and dying, I understand that much; that when you roll away from each other go to sleep, then the dream is over for another day.

Veronica who has lost her way in this world, but did not realize it until her brother died. That brother, and his story, is the driving force in this book, but is not truly the source of Veronica’s deep anger, anger so deep it is depression as well as fury. This is a hard book to read; not enjoyable, but open, almost like a corpse splayed in autopsy, welling with emotion. It is the story of a family that has never been happy, even as it has been successful, even as it has grown and prospered, even as the siblings cling to and love one another. Nevertheless, it is beautifully rendered. It is worthy of its prize.