Volume 55, Number 6 · April 17, 2008
The Fantasy Family
By Tim Parks
The Gathering
by Anne Enright.
Grove/Black Cat, 261 pp., $14.00 (paper)
The Gathering, title of the winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize, refers ostensibly to the assembly of a large family for the wake and funeral of one of its members, but we might also consider the book, the fourth novel by Irish writer Anne Enright, as a gathering of powerfully unpleasant images involving the superimposition of sex, death, and decay. Early on, the narrator and main character, Veronica Hegarty, imagines Lamb Nugent, a friend of the family and long-thwarted suitor of her grandmother, masturbating over memories of his dying sister:
Review, 3403 words
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