7 of 8 members found this review helpful.
“Yes, I know it won the most prestigious literary award in Britain, but I found it a disappointment. Enright is obviously a very good prose stylist who can summon up beautiful, even startling imagery and insights, and the book is laced with them. But I feel she would have created a much more powerful work had she shaped The Gathering as a long short story or a novella. What starts out with great promise deteriorates after four chapters into the sort of abject tedium one imagines a psychotherapist must feel after Patient A shows up for her thousandth one-hour session to drone on about her not very interesting or remarkable childhood traumas. The deep dark secret the narrator spends half the book building (or more exactly, circling) towards hasn’t nearly the shock value or drama to justify the meandering journey through her consciousness and memories that takes up the vast majority of this novel. Things take a great turn for the better in the final third, and manage to redeem the piece, but just barely.
While wading through The Gathering, I couldn’t help thinking of another great, and unknown, Irish writer, Maeve Brennan, whose amazing long story “The Springs of Affection” tackles similar subject matter and manages to pack more power and devastating emotional punch in less than a hundred pages than Enright comes close to achieving here. Less would have been so much more.”
