"The Gathering" by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape, 2007)

It begins with a kind of in media res mood-prelude (as do several of her stories), then settles down, though the time-line's never linear for long.

Veronica, the narrator comes from a big Irish family. In the old days, life was busy -

Don't tell Mammy This from Midge, especially, but also from any one of the older ones. If something broke or was split, if Bea did not come home or Mossie went up to live in the attic, or Liam dropped acid, or Alive had sex, or Kitty bled buckets into her new school uniform, or any number of phone messages about delays, snarl-ups, problems with bus money and taxi money, and once catastrophically, Liam's night in the cells. None of the messages relayed: the whispered conference in the hall, Don't tell Mammy (p.9)

Now her mother's demented. Veronica's come back to tell them that Liam's dead.

One device is that the narrator tells us she's imagining what happened to others in the past, so for example we read how she thought her grandparents might have met in 1925, etc. This offers the writer a chance to present alternative possibilities but we don't often get them at first. She does however correct some memories as she goes along, remembering that certain people must have been present though she recalls nothing of them. The narrating's sometimes self-conscious - "Poor Charlie. His was the first corpse I ever saw; massive and still under Ada's rose-pink eiderdown. Which is why is it a kind of blasphemy to write of their marriage night in the same bed - though blasphemy seems to be my business here" (p.59)

Liam died in Brighton, England, so she journeys over, reminiscing on the way - "we ran around the streets or played around The Basin, an artificial lake whose water had once been used in the making of Irish whiskey. It was this fact that obliged Liam to piss into it, and this is the picture I have of him in my head, a small boy swinging up his behind to sling the arc of his pee up in the air, the urine spattering against the wire or pouring, suddenly easy, through a diamond in the mesh" (p.48)

It will take 10 days to ship the body back. She thinks her husband, Tom, is unfaithful. She fancies the young undertaker. She thinks about Ada again. Note the trajectory of the thoughts in the following extract - herself, Ada, Women, herself - and the combination of sharp-focussed detail with generalisation

I think of her when I do the dishes. Of course I have a dishwasher, so if I ever have to cry, it is not into the sink, quietly like Ada. The sink was her place for this. Facing out of the back of the house, something about the endless potatoes that needed peeling, or the paltriness of the yard, but, like all women maybe, Ada occasionally had a little sniffle and then plink, plink, a few tears would hit the water in the sink. Like all women Ada sometimes had to wipe her nose with her forearm because her hands were wet. There is nothing surprising about this. Though I have to say, I have a stainless-steel Miele dishwasher. And if I have any crying to do, I do it respectably, in front of the TV. (p.89)

On p.142 things get serious - "It is time to put an end to the shifting stories and the waking dreams". She tells us how she witnessed Liam's sexual abuse. Later she's unsure of the details, wonders if she was involved.

The end is rather fragmentary, perhaps because of her precarious mental state. She has a phase of sneaking out of the house at night to drive. Or to drink and drive. She knows something's wrong with her. She's in a loveless marriage with kids. She revisits places from her childhood, wonders whether she has the right location because the places doesn't match her memories, then realises that places change too. The family gather from around the world for the wake. Some are nearly strangers to her. She hallucinates. That night she and her husband have sex for the last time. Chapter 36 jumps to 5 months later, then we return to the main time sequence again. She wants everyone to know who molested Liam - he could be responsible for the family's other woes. She wonders who owned Ada's house and considers buying a house. She flees to Gatwick, stays there a night and plans to return immediately, wonders about having a third child.

Other reviews

• Eleanor Birne (The narrator is someone new too; part of the new Ireland. She is Veronica, the dead Liam’s (slightly) younger sister, who lives a comfortable middle-class existence, and is trying to work out where she fits in with all this – with their combined past, and Liam’s death ... The Gathering is a gathering of family members around one of their dead, but it is also a gathering of facts, of evidence.)
• AL Kennedy (This is a world where fidelity is impossible and sex is absurd, but love is forever, like a scar. ... Enright's work is neither mindless nor inhuman; it is clearly the product of a remarkable intelligence, combined with a gift for observation and deduction.)
• Adam Mars-Jones (So large a family is more like a tribe, with its own rites of passage ... Anne Enright has all she needs in terms of imagination and technique and she's a tremendous phrase-maker. All that I would timidly offer her is a bouquet of 'as ifs' with which to vary her 'likes'.)
• Ling Ma (A common theme in earlier works that’s more noticeable here, Enright fixates and marvels at the plain biological facts of sex with the consequential emotional realities of family. ... her prose can be so gun-slingingly sublime, but the narration is often so footloose that it almost overrides the plot and characters themselves.)
• Liesl Schillinger (in this mystery of past causes, the transformative power of Enright’s language keeps the story’s freight from burdening the reader. Veronica’s reminiscences have an incantatory power that makes them not depressing but enthralling ... With her curiously spare yet baroque style and her merciless eye, Anne Enright has beguiled critics for nearly two decades. In the past, she has often let fantasy or coincidence shape her creations. ... In this new novel, however, Enright hides her painterly brushstrokes.)
• Goodreads

"Taking Pictures" by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape, 2008)

Stories from New Yorker, Granta, Paris Review, etc. They're 10-15 pages long, except for "Wife" which is about 5, and "Green" which is about 7 pages. Frequent features are sexy men, big-framed men, bunches of tissues, and women (especially mothers) dying of cancer.

Even when I didn't especially like a story as a whole, there are usually interesting aspects or passages - e.g. "it was a joke of an asylum, looming and Victorian, people muttering a whining in the bare wards, and a smell everywhere of bleach and sperm that was like your own madness, not theirs" (p.10).

I wasn't keen on "In the Bed Department" (though it's interesting how centrally the lift and its hidden mechanism features), "Natalie", "Switzerland" (which ends well though - "They gave him the sofa to sleep on, so Elaine crept downstairs in the middle of the night and they had the quietest sex known to mankind. They inched their way along the floor and ended up under the table where, looking up, Elaine saw a crayoned boat she had drawn, one endlessly idle afternoon, when she was nine or ten. A green boat with a blue sail. Her own secret sign./ Where do you want to go? he said. Where do you want to go, now?" (p.113)), "Green" and "Shaft". The main character in "Honey" behaves in an unconvincing way. "Taking Pictures" isn't entirely successful either. The last page of "Little Sister" redeems it. "Until the girl died" has little going for it until the ending.

"Caravan" is the kind of story I write sometimes, though I can't get them published. A couple with two young kids survive a rainy caravan holiday packed with little crises. The mother sees a ghost (of herself, perhaps). The ending of "The Cruise" doesn't save it, though it's close. "Wife" mostly works - a husband is seen with daughter, wife, mother and female shop-keeper, thinking about an 11-year old long ago.

"The Bad Sex Weekend" is good - "That was Sligo. A place where it rained all day and the rent-boys hung out for the blokes down from Northern Ireland, and they called a housing estate after W.B.Yeats, and you could rot, or you could run" (p.69). "Yesterday's Weather" is more of an ensemble piece, mentioning many people at a family party. I liked it - "She had planted the bulbs the week they got the keys: kneeling on the front path, seven months' pregnant, digging with the little shovel from the fire-irons; a straight line from the gate to the door of fat, red tulips, the type you get in a park - 'a bit municipal', as her mother had said, squinting at the pack - that were now flaming red at the tips, like little cups of green fire" (p.143). The flowers reappear near the end. In "Della" a woman hears a blind old man struggling next door. She's never liked him. She's struggling too with age. His noises gradually become a greater part of her life. Finally she knocks on his door. It's good.

Other reviews

• Hermione Lee (Parents, in story after story, are ill, must be cared for, die, are buried, are lost for ever - their endings told with a breathtaking mixture of dryness and depth)
• Stephanie Merritt
• Katy Guest (The collection is haunted, by dead mothers, missing sisters and religious guilt. But among the ghosts and smells and screams that saturate life, there are unexpected opportunities for joy.)
• Sheila Cornelius (With one exception, the narrators in these nineteen stories are female and for the most part lower-middle-class)
• bookbag (Definite highlights are Pale hands I loved, beside the Shalamar about one woman's affair with her childhood sweetheart who was also mentally disabled and Until the Girl Died)

"The Forgotten Waltz" by Anne Enright (Vintage 2012)

The start's rather strange-

I met him in sister's garden in Enniskerry. That is where I saw him first. There was nothing fated about it, though I add in the late summer light and the view. I put him at the bottom of my sister's garden, in the afternoon, at the moment the day begins to turn. Half five maybe. It is half past five on a Wicklow summer Sunday when I see Sean for the first time. There he is, where the end of my sister's garden becomes uncertain..

The narrator, Gina, is telling us about her marriage with Conor and affair with Sean (father of Evie), self-consciously telling a story -"And I can't, for the life of me, recall what Evie looked like that day" (p.10), "Let's start with Conor. Conor is easy" (p.11). She claims she might have begun to fall in love with Sean in any of a few occasions - maybe at first sight. The onset of her mother's depression is equally unclear.

Chapter heading are phrases from song lyrics. The "Sunny Afternoon" chapter is backstory. Gradually I became more impressed. The novel manages to convey one person's obsession for another without being tedious, partly because the language remains lively -

And the anger that came with this was terrible; the pure annoyance of smashing my way out of one box, only to find myself in another one. There is nothing like a bit of drama on an empty coastline, the shrill little screams and foot stampings entertainment for the gulls, tinnitus for the fishes. There is nothing so pointless and refreshing: a sad backside hitting a million affronted grains of sand, the faint ticking, in the rocks, of footsteps walking away. Conor went back to the car and left me to it (p.73)

there she was, in a perfect little kilt and, my goodness, black patent leather shoes Then Aileen was in the hall, all mock bustle and precision. (p.80)

In my absence, the party had shifted up a gear. You can never catch the moment when it happens, but it always does: that split second when awkwardness flowers into intimacy. This is my favourite time. (p.88)

There is something so open about a hotel bed, the duvet kicked away; it was like a plinth, or a padded stage, and the shapes we made there were more sweet and anguished for seeming abstract (p.98)

The walls were hung with paintings done to match the carpet; an increasingly sickening series of abstracts in cream and maroon that looked like they came out of the same two pots of paint (p.108)

The death of the narrator's mother is dealt with well

The first I heard was a phone call from the duty nurse at ten o'clock that night, explaining that our moth had been taken to the hospital , and perhaps I would like to come in. I mean, the woman was dead, she was effectively dead, but this must be what they say to relatives in such circumstances. And I knew this and did not know it, at the same time. (p.114)

After, the narrator's affair is discovered. People keep saying they knew all along, or at least that they're not surprised. She begins to live in her mother's house (which is where she grew up - it's been empty for a while, attracting no buyers). Her married lover stays most nights, returning "home" for breakfast. I like the writing in this part of the book - part II.

Sean was in Enniskerry doing Santa Claus for a child who no longer believed in Santa Claus. Aileen was serving a light fino before lunch. I was alone. And the person I missed was my sister, the woman who was glad - as she said, glad - our mother was dead, so she wouldn't have to witness the way I was carrying on. She was wrong about that, by the way. My mother would have understood. My mother with her handsome, infuriating husband; she would have kissed the top of my sad head (p.173)

Time stands still -

Sean in in my sister's garden in Enniskerry, with his back to me and his face to the view ... Sean stands at the window in his pyjamas, with the frost flowering across the window. Or he stands at the window in the summer light and his naked back is a puzzle of muscle and bone - he still look like a young man, from behind - and I want to whisper, Turn around. Or, Don't turn around. The weeks I spent waiting for his call, the months I spent waiting for him to leave Aileen. The loneliness of it was, in its own way, fantastic (p.180)

The problem is that Sean doesn't want to leave his daughter. The narrator recounts the daughter's first fit in detail, as if she'd been there, because it matters so much to her. She imagines the hospital scenes - "Each sick, or even dying, child - beautiful as a flower - seemed to be attached to some unwashed parent, who slept on the floor" (p.196). The anti-epilepsy drugs they tried had side-effects. Aileen's anxiety doesn't help. "there is something in Evie's story that Sean is constantly trying to understand. Something about himself, perhaps" (p.200). But Gina struggles with the story too. Working out dates she realises that his affairs weren't triggered by the events he claimed. "He loves me now. Or he loves me too./ Or./ I love him. And that is as much as any of us can know."

Aileen chucks Sean out when she thinks that his double-life is affecting Evie. Later, Evie stays with Gina and Sean some nights. Gina is jealous of Evie and Sean's closeness, but at the end Gina and Evie have a girlie trip to the shops, try on make-up, have a coffee, talk about the man they share. Things might just work out.

"'What's "Gina" short for?' 'Nothing'" (p.229), and indeed, Gina struggles a little with self-image. Her father died when she was a child, and her relationships with men aren't ideal. She can hold conflicting views about love and death simultaneously, flipping between opposites.

Other reviews

• Goodreads
• Hermione Lee (Guardian)
• Edmund Gordon (Telegraph) (Hers is a style that glories in minutiae. She modulates so finely between comedy and pathos, between psychology and physicality, that she conveys a sense of the richness of lived experience, compared to which most other novelists appear to work in broad strokes. There are sentences in her work, whole passages even, that you want to mark up and learn off by heart for their warmth and humour, their sense of truth. ... The novel’s only significant shortcoming is its lack of narrative tension)
• Francine Prose (New York Times)
• Emma Hagestadt (Independent)