The Gathering, in the beginning

There are very few novels which grab you before page 30 and have you thinking, "Yeah. This is going to be really good," but The Gathering by Anne Enright is hitting me just that way.

I get really excited by books that read like literature, not like entertainment only, but which are thought-provoking throughout their texts. That's probably why I end up reading Evelyn Waugh rather than Sophie Kinsella despite the social trends of those in my demographic. But Enright invites the reader to question her and wander (and wonder) away from her with the first lines: "I would like to write down what happened in my grandmothers house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure it really did happen. I need to bear witness to an uncertain event." I count three blatant uncertainties and could produce a couple more if I were truly to analyze the tone and diction and go serious literature student on you, but I'll spare you.

Immediately I start thinking about the essence of memory and story-telling, how the truth we proclaim isn't really the truth, but our own perception of a slightly (or enormously) tweaked version of events, of half-truths and partial-events. There are tons of studies out there on the reliance of memory, especially over time, questioning its accuracy to history...and here is a story where a grown woman, with children of her own, proclaims she is going to recollect what happened in her elementary school days.

Already, the voice is so caustically honest at points (ie: There were girls at school whose families grew to a robust five or six. There were girls with seven or eight - which was though a little enthusiastic - and then there were the pathetic ones like me, who had parents that were just helpless to it, and bred as naturally as they might shit) and other times where the image is too romanticized to seem possible. (ie: She walked into the foyer and did not look about her and sat in an oval-backed chair near the door. Lamb Nugent watched her through a rush of arrivals and instructions as she removed her left-hand glove and then picked off the right. She pulled a little bracelet our from under her sleeve, and the hand that held the gloves settled in her lap. She was beautiful, of course.) Enright paints a world tainted with vivacious colors or dripping in sepia. Either way, it's engaging.

All this, and I've only briefly touched upon a topic I could expand upon for pages. And this, only one of several topics I could discuss in the 30 pages I've read. And those 30 pages being less than a sixth of the book. And really, I have spoken hardly an ounce about any character or plot line but rather about the intricacies of the text, where literature really rests. Talk about the tip of the iceberg.