Anne Enright’s fourth novel,
The Gathering, covers all the thematic bases of the contemporary Irish family saga – Catholicism, morality, alcoholism, love, marriage, sex, generation gap, child abuse, death and mourning – as it records its protagonist-narrator’s coming to terms with the loss of a beloved brother and with the constraints of her own belonging to a supernumerary family. Yet it wears its Irishness lightly and its raw humanity displayed defiantly on its sleeve, as it were. Received with mixed yet passionate reviews by critics and readers alike, the novel garnered the 2007 Man Booker Prize. By general consent, its greatest strength is its unique, pared down, occasionally overwritten, sporadically abrasive, compelling style that has all the visceral immediacy of the open…
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Citation: Schneider, Ana-Karina. "The Gathering". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 March 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=24308, accessed 18 April 2024.]
