Anne Enright's The Gathering
The
Gathering is the first Anne Enright novel I have read. Winner of the
Man Booker Prize in 2007, it is a beautifully told story of one
sister, Veronica Hegarty's, grief and of her large family in Dublin
gathering for the wake of her closest brother Liam who drowned
walking into the sea in England. Grief. Suicide. Family dynamics.
Abuse.
My only
hesitation with this story is the seeming link at least in the
narrator's mind between sexual abuse of children and homosexuality.
This theme is more common in literature than I believe the science
warrants. (Starting with Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall On Your Knees
from as far back as 1996.) The reason it disturbs me is that it seems
to assume that both homosexuality and its causes are pathological.
For me, this is a problem, the ghost of outmoded ideas. As I suspect
it would be to most in the LGBTQ community.
