Anne Enright's novel, The Gathering, concerns the death by suicide of the narrator's brother. The gathering refers to the mostly family mourners at the funeral. The suicide was conflicted, of course, but also described as the kind of person you search out for friendship. He reminded me of my also deceased partner.
Anne Enright writes about Ireland. She tends to gloss over the river dancing, Gaelic speaking, pub dwelling, fairy loving bits, and hit exactly on the actual people — real people — that inhabit any place the travel writers haven’t idealized into unrecognizable specimens.
This is the second novel of Enright’s that I’ve read, the other being The Wren, The Wren, which she populated with yet more real Irelanders. Wren spanned three generations as did Gathering. Both novels focused on cross generation influences, one to those following, with a lot of recriminations cast back by the succeeding generation to its forebears. But in Gathering those influences become unhealed and unhealable sores that dismay and disrupt. They seem unforgiveable and unnegotiable.
The central incident of the novel features a bad act of a member of the first generation on a young member of the third generation. It involves a kid, a boy, being molested by an older man. The boy, later becoming a man, as they do, kills himself. It’s his death and attendant funeral that’s the occasion for the gathering of the title.
The narrator of the story is the one-year younger sister of the suicide. Together they make up only a middle pair of twelve siblings, all of whom are described as scarred in one way or another. The causes are only speculated on, but the narrator seems to lay the blame on the inattentions of their parents. The mother is presented as essentially a baby factory operated by the nightly comings and goings of a tough frequently absent father.
The narrator is just as harsh on herself as she in on her family, especially as concerns the brother who killed himself. She takes it harder than the others perhaps because she was witness as a young girl to the molesting of her brother and never brought it up with her parents sibs. Did they know anyway?
So much for plot development.
The more interesting aspect of the novel for me popped out in one short description the narrator gives of her brother:
Oh! He was desperate. He was a terrible messer. He was always full of it. He just couldn’t get it together. He had a good heart. He was all there. He was the best of company, we will say. Oh! But the wit. He had a tongue in his head, there’s no doubt about that! But he was very sensitive. You wanted to look after him. He was not able for this world. Not really.
She could have been describing my partner, Wayne, dead now like her brother. In Wayne’s case that took place some thirty-five years ago and I’m writing about it just now. He was not a suicide. He was beaten down and carried off by AIDS at the height of the epidemic that took thousands of lives, mostly gay men. Wayne at the time was forty-five years old and we had been together as a couple for eleven of those years.
Those eleven years, as much as they may have begun in the vigor and energy of a newly acquired love, showed in the tea leaves (if I had read them) a future that would be turbulent. Our love affair began in a gay bath house, after all, not a place like church, where you’d more likely find the ideal homebody. And Wayne was a habitue.
I’m not exonerating myself here. I was at the ‘tubs,’ as we called it affectionately, under no duress. The difference between us was that I was there to date, while Wayne was there to be trashy. On that first meeting, we both got what we wanted. Over the next few weeks we negotiated a middle ground and over the following months set up house together.
It was clear on meeting Wayne’s friends that he was the free spirit that people enjoyed and to some extent lived vicariously on. I have to include myself in that hanger-on, groupy crowd, too, because I was decidedly nobody’s idea of free spirit. That imbalance between us eventually came to be a sore point, because he never gave up his appetite for a new flavor, a taste of something fresh. I was doing the bulk of the earning and he was largely establishing our status in the gay community.
So how do you go on loving someone like that? I have to make clear that I did so, and likely would still be with him today, if he had lived. Was that some kind of self flagellation? I do remember more than on one occasion when the thought registered that this relation is just fucked up. I want to leave, but that’s giving up, isn’t it?
Anyway, AIDS did what I couldn’t and ended the relationship. My reaction was now, what do I do? I started experimenting to see what I might be capable of and what I might be good at. Short story: I found out that during those eleven years with Wayne, some of the essential him had rubbed off on me. Not all of him, by any means. He was wit and effervescence, all the time. I can pull that off occasionally, but before I met him, never. So teaching and learning took place subtely, not effortlessly, but it took.
So getting back to Enright’s book, I was hoping that the sister narrator of the dead brother would mirror my own ‘growth,’ and not be defeated by loss, particularly the loss of someone best sampled, not indulged in. But she does not. She seems not to have learned, almost as if she took on herself some blame for his suicide.
Maybe there were not enough years left in the telling to see how the arc of her life bent up eventually, but her path seemed to run not toward her foundations, but away to the same beach where her brother drowned himself. Not a suicide herself, but broken.
I knew from my own story that it didn’t have to be that way. I was surprised how a narrator capable of relating such an honest and compelling story about her life and her feelings could not have set herself on a more self-affirming track. But Enright is an author who I deeply admire and whose judgment about the fates of her characters speaks to some essential truth. It just wasn’t mine.
Difficult People You Can’t Help Loving
Anne Enright’s novel The Gathering
Anne Enright writes about Ireland. She tends to gloss over the river dancing, Gaelic speaking, pub dwelling, fairy loving bits, and hit exactly on the actual people — real people — that inhabit any place the travel writers haven’t idealized into unrecognizable specimens.
This is the second novel of Enright’s that I’ve read, the other being The Wren, The Wren, which she populated with yet more real Irelanders. Wren spanned three generations as did Gathering. Both novels focused on cross generation influences, one to those following, with a lot of recriminations cast back by the succeeding generation to its forebears. But in Gathering those influences become unhealed and unhealable sores that dismay and disrupt. They seem unforgiveable and unnegotiable.
The central incident of the novel features a bad act of a member of the first generation on a young member of the third generation. It involves a kid, a boy, being molested by an older man. The boy, later becoming a man, as they do, kills himself. It’s his death and attendant funeral that’s the occasion for the gathering of the title.
The narrator of the story is the one-year younger sister of the suicide. Together they make up only a middle pair of twelve siblings, all of whom are described as scarred in one way or another. The causes are only speculated on, but the narrator seems to lay the blame on the inattentions of their parents. The mother is presented as essentially a baby factory operated by the nightly comings and goings of a tough frequently absent father.
The narrator is just as harsh on herself as she in on her family, especially as concerns the brother who killed himself. She takes it harder than the others perhaps because she was witness as a young girl to the molesting of her brother and never brought it up with her parents sibs. Did they know anyway?
So much for plot development.
The more interesting aspect of the novel for me popped out in one short description the narrator gives of her brother:
She could have been describing my partner, Wayne, dead now like her brother. In Wayne’s case that took place some thirty-five years ago and I’m writing about it just now. He was not a suicide. He was beaten down and carried off by AIDS at the height of the epidemic that took thousands of lives, mostly gay men. Wayne at the time was forty-five years old and we had been together as a couple for eleven of those years.
Those eleven years, as much as they may have begun in the vigor and energy of a newly acquired love, showed in the tea leaves (if I had read them) a future that would be turbulent. Our love affair began in a gay bath house, after all, not a place like church, where you’d more likely find the ideal homebody. And Wayne was a habitue.
I’m not exonerating myself here. I was at the ‘tubs,’ as we called it affectionately, under no duress. The difference between us was that I was there to date, while Wayne was there to be trashy. On that first meeting, we both got what we wanted. Over the next few weeks we negotiated a middle ground and over the following months set up house together.
It was clear on meeting Wayne’s friends that he was the free spirit that people enjoyed and to some extent lived vicariously on. I have to include myself in that hanger-on, groupy crowd, too, because I was decidedly nobody’s idea of free spirit. That imbalance between us eventually came to be a sore point, because he never gave up his appetite for a new flavor, a taste of something fresh. I was doing the bulk of the earning and he was largely establishing our status in the gay community.
So how do you go on loving someone like that? I have to make clear that I did so, and likely would still be with him today, if he had lived. Was that some kind of self flagellation? I do remember more than on one occasion when the thought registered that this relation is just fucked up. I want to leave, but that’s giving up, isn’t it?
Anyway, AIDS did what I couldn’t and ended the relationship. My reaction was now, what do I do? I started experimenting to see what I might be capable of and what I might be good at. Short story: I found out that during those eleven years with Wayne, some of the essential him had rubbed off on me. Not all of him, by any means. He was wit and effervescence, all the time. I can pull that off occasionally, but before I met him, never. So teaching and learning took place subtely, not effortlessly, but it took.
So getting back to Enright’s book, I was hoping that the sister narrator of the dead brother would mirror my own ‘growth,’ and not be defeated by loss, particularly the loss of someone best sampled, not indulged in. But she does not. She seems not to have learned, almost as if she took on herself some blame for his suicide.
Maybe there were not enough years left in the telling to see how the arc of her life bent up eventually, but her path seemed to run not toward her foundations, but away to the same beach where her brother drowned himself. Not a suicide herself, but broken.
I knew from my own story that it didn’t have to be that way. I was surprised how a narrator capable of relating such an honest and compelling story about her life and her feelings could not have set herself on a more self-affirming track. But Enright is an author who I deeply admire and whose judgment about the fates of her characters speaks to some essential truth. It just wasn’t mine.
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