The Gathering, by Anne Enright

I finished The Gathering this weekend (my mother did, too) – and while I am truly inspired by her writing (she’s the kind of writer that makes me BURN to pick up my pencil, and try again) – I found the book almost unbearably depressing. I liked her take on Ireland now – we’ve had enough of twee Ireland thankyouverymuch – she’s writing from the midst of the Celtic Tiger (although her book isn’t strictly about that) – but the main character, with her Saab and her charcoal and slate interior design – is obviously reaping the benefits of Ireland’s new wealth. But the memories of the characters are from the bleaker more rigid 60s and 70s – and I’m not against sad books, for God’s sake, no … but I found myself 3/4s of the way through looking forward to the end. It was too much for me. I did not experience that with, say, Atonement, which is probably the saddest book I have ever read. But with The Gathering I twitched with impatience to be done with it. This has nothing to do with her writing – which I love. I love it so much I want to EAT it. I want to cut it with a knife like a big fat piece of cheesecake. It is so so good. Her bits about the Irish blue eyes, the Hegarty eyes – she just gets Ireland, or at least a portion of it. The tormented part of it. The pious surface, and the sexual underbelly. Ireland must be dealt with on its own terms. Its past is huge. The sins done to that country – by their own clergy, by the very nature of Catholicism – must still be handled and faced. None of it is pretty. My great-aunt, who is a nun, has told me stories about working in Ireland in the early and late 60s, awesome stories (my great-aunt is one of the most amazing women I have ever known, a true idol to me) – but her funny and ridiculous stories are so so revealing about what was going on in Ireland, especially during the upheaval of Vatican II. There is a sense that reality itself cannot be looked at, in Ireland. Joyce said he wanted to hold up a looking-glass to his country and if they didn’t like what they saw, then whose fault is that? This is what her book is about. I can see it might have cut too close to the bone. My mother and I talked about it a bit. Ireland has grown and changed. Shackles flung off. I suppose family issues are family issues anywhere, and in any generation. It doesn’t matter that Ireland is now some Celtic Tiger. There are ghosts, demons, nightmares. Enright’s territory is family, the suffocation of a large poor family in Ireland. Too many kids, too many obligations, exhausted mother, absent father … too many relationships to manage … an extended state of childhood, where your SIBLINGS continue to carry such weight in your mind. Other cultures do not have this. Or if they do – certainly not to the same mythological level that Ireland reaches. Enright writes about a family with 12 children (and 7 miscarriages, let’s not forget) – and the chaotic raw upbringing that such a family would demand. No care-taking of souls, or development of personality and mind – it’s just about being dragged up, each fighting for his own piece of turf. And they’re all just messed UP! I was exhausted by the Hegartys. This is my terrain, so maybe it just pushed a button – a button I honestly don’t want pushed. But her writing is so wonderful, so weird and angry and … itself – it truly feels like an original voice – an “Enright” voice – in the same way that Annie Proulx seems completely original to me, someone who is just herself … and reading such stuff always inspires me. To do better, work harder, go deeper … be more myself. And hang the consequences. There will be those who will not like what I write. But I cannot worry about those people. I am not writing for them. The point is to express, to work hard, to hone my skills, and to be myself. Because there’s only one me. And I am not reinventing the wheel, obviously, but I can only be the best Sheila-writer I can be. There WILL be an audience for such things. Those who are nit-picky, or offended, or who take me defensively – and always need to set themselves up in opposition to me … are not the ones I am writing for. Anne Enright’s book has helped me to see that.

But damn, I’m glad it’s over. The tragedy of the Irish (for me) must be taken in small doses. Now I’m moving on to John McGahern’s last novel – By the Lake – a portrait of a small rural community in the west of Ireland – and it has its own ghosts, echoes, problems – problems of a strictly Irish nature … but it’s not so unremittingly bleak.

I feel like I need to qualify all of this. Enright’s writing (as you will see in the excerpt below) is not bleak, in and of itself. It’s actually quite lively. She rollicks along, it feels rather conversational – and there are funny spot-on observations that make me nod in recognition – she’s so good that way – it’s just that I found it all too sad. And I wanted it to be over.

Here’s a wonderful example of her writing. Veronica is describing one of her first loves – Michael Weiss, an American exchange student at UCD.

From The Gathering by Anne Enright:

I fell in love, I am beginning to realise, in my early twenties, when I met and slept with a guy from Brooklyn called Michael Weiss. He was in Dublin for an MA in Irish studies or Celtic studies, or what have you – we despised those courses, they were just something the college did to get rich Americans, and so I was surprised to find myself in love with Michael Weiss; surprised too because he was not a tall American with big prairie bones, but an average-sized guy who smoked rollups and talked with a Brooklyn pebble in his mouth, part slur and part contemplation.

Sleeping with him was very sweet, the way he would prop himself up to look at you and talk. He loved to chat while he was touching you, he loved even to smoke in this endless lazy foreplay that was all foreign to me then. I was twenty years old. I wasn’t used to sex that was so aimless and unspecific. I wasn’t used to sex that was sober, I suppose, and all this talking just made me uncomfortable: I thought he didn’t fancy me. I watched his face move and wished he would just get on with it – the astonishing bit, the thing we were both here for.

I think, in his ironic, slow way Michael Weiss knew that he couldn’t hold on to me, and all he was doing in those drowsy afternoons was trying to talk me down, like a cat in a tree, or an air hostess in charge of the plain. ‘You see that leh-ver to your right? I want you to ease that leh-ver down to forty-five degrees.’

And though we got through a surprising amount of it – sex, that is – all I can remember is my madness at the time, watching the day outside his window shift to dusk in jolts and patches. It was, perhaps, an adolescent thing; standing naked on the nylon carpet of his student bedsit and feeling the change of light to be impossible; like my skin was being stripped off, as the day gave way, in tics and lunges, to dark.

Michael’s father was an artist and his mother was something else. I wasn’t used to that either – most of the parents I knew were just parents – but he had this semi-famous father and this mother who made appointments and met people and dressed up to go out, and so he had all of that dragging behind him. It was hard for him to know what he was going to do when he grew up, because he had been grown up, at a guess, since he was ten years old. He wrote some poems, and they were probably quite good poems, but the idea of getting anywhere was a problem for him. There was money – not a lot of money, but some – and he had decided I think, even then, just to exist, and see what came his way.

So now he is just existing, as I am, though probably somewhere more interesting than Booterstown, Dublin 4. He is in Manhattan, say, or the canyons of LA, and he is taking his son to saxophone lessons, he is turning up to his daughter’s dance showcase on a Thursday afternoon, and finding all of that an important and amusing thing to do.

I went out with Michael Weiss for two years, on and off; driven crazy by his languor – made inadequate by it, and impatient for the world ahead of us, that was full of things to do. I was not sure what these things were, but they would be better than just hanging around all afternoon, kissing and smoking, talking about – what? – whether Dirk Bogarde was actually good-looking, and how, or how not to be, a Jew.

Now, of course, my afternoons are spent not watching the television, so I was undoubtedly right to distrust and finally leave Michael Weiss for a better, faster life, the one I have now, cooking for a man who doesn’t show up before nine and for two girls who will shortly stop showing up too. Having tear-streaked sex, once in a blue moon, with my middle-aged husband; not knowing whether to hit him or kiss him.

Switch on the light, I want to say. Switch on the light.

But it is not just the sex, or remembered sex, that makes me think I love Michael Weiss from Brooklyn, now, seventeen years too late. It is the way he refused to own me, no matter how much I tried to be owned. It was the way he would not take me, he would only meet me, and that only ever halfway.

I think I am ready for that now. I think I am ready to be met.