Around the Rough Edges in the Family Album

Anne Enright’s Man Booker Prize-winning book is so bleak that ordinariness is made hopeful

In a strange way, Anne Enright’s The Gathering — which won her the Man Booker Prize last fortnight — brings to mind the fiction of Carol Shields. Like the Irish Enright, the Canadian Shields too was a habitual inquirer into the dynamics of family life and what it could say about a society, a people, a point in time in history. But Shields went about her task so differently from the manner in which Enright does. Dwelling a bit on those differences helps make sense of The Gathering (Jonathan Cape, 7.75 pounds).

Shields, who passed away in 2003, was, as her charmed critics would say, accomplished in capturing light. It was not at all that her fiction was escapist; instead, in dwelling on the paces of the daily lived life, in remaining mindful of individual ways of ushering in aspects of happiness into one’s life through pursuits and varied interests, she delineated the unsaid. In this textured rendition of the lived lives — as in her last novel Unless, where a woman must cope with her teenage daughter’s sudden decision to silently live in a street corner — we would get a sense of the darker crevices, without them being overtly profiled.

Enright’s approach appears to be completely the opposite. In The Gathering, 39-year-old Veronica is drawn back into considering the dark, bleak aspects of her family life when her favourite brother Liam kills himself by walking into the sea, with stones in his pocket. Veronica, who had grown up among a large brood of siblings, never had a satisfying relationship with either of her parents. To make bearable her grief now, she finds she needs to look back longer into the past to find some kind of traction in her remembrances. She gets a coherent starting point in her grandmother Ada, though it is never clear how much of her story is based on recounted fragments and how much is imagined.

Quickly Veronica puts together a web of relationships — in her mourning, she cannot sleep till daybreak, and the stories she tells are gathered together at night while pottering about, while her husband and daughters are asleep. Not for nothing is Enright’s writing called bleak: the relationships are so deeply unsatisfying that it is only the dark humour in her prose that keeps one reading on in stretches.

Yet as Veronica appears to gather evidence of the pointlessness of interaction and affection, something quite the opposite happens. As she scrapes away layers of proof of this kind of pointlessness, an unexpected optimism is uncovered: to find proof of this pointlessness is not to find the rule, but to in fact carry forward in the hope that it will not attach itself to at least a few of your associations.

The Gathering has a lovely ending. A lovely last paragraph makes bearable the overwriting in parts of the novel.