The Gathering, by Anne Enright, is a dark novel told in first person by Veronica Hegarty, who is mourning her brother Liam after his suicide.

In the process of trying to come to terms with what has happened, Veronica ruminates over the past two generations of her family's history, imagining the lives of her grandmother Ada, her husband Charlie, and their landlord Lambert Nugent, who may also have been Ada's lover. The past is a blur, and in fact everything seems to be blurred--past and present, conjecture and fact.

Veronica and Liam were born into an Irish Catholic family in Dublin and were very close, both emotionally and chronologically, which in this case means, "eleven months apart." They were middle children in a brood of twelve (there were also several miscarriages). I probably don't have to actually point this out, but they were poor and crowded. Included in Veronica's murky memory is the year when she was farmed out to her grandparents' house along with Liam and younger sister Kitty. We know that their mother "Mamie" is in a permanent fog of some kind and was knee deep in child rearing at the time. Veronica's bitterness about having parents who hardly knew their children is evident, as well as being sent to live in a house where they are viewed as "in the way" and treated like charity cases.

Despite the fact that Veronica is so melancholy and serious, she does show a a very funny dry sense of humor at surprising times. It's a gift of comic relief for Enright's readers, because eventually what follows is a memory of what probably happened that year, when she and Liam were 8 and 9 (respectively), as well as a trip through all of her guilt feelings about why she wound up with a comfortable, middle class life and her brother didn't. Veronica is in a secure marriage, a homemaker and mother of two daughters, but her emotional distress is threatening to do real damage to her family life. There is so much about the past and its effect on their lives that is simply unknowable. There is no why, there is no answer to the question, "what led Liam to do this?"

I'm not sure how to interpret the ending, but I hope that in the end, Veronica does fall back into her settled life, to her loving and deserving husband and daughters. She's come frightfully close to running off, though. Too close.

The Gathering is a grim but fascinating journey, I'm glad to have read it, but it's not for everyone. I found the style to be pleasingly literary while still being very assessable.