The Gathering

Whenever I think about The Gathering the four words that come to mind are bitter, bleak, depressing, and, sorry Anne Enright, boring. While I was not a big fan of the particularly slow pace of the novel, the thing that really bothered me about the book was how every time Veronica Hegarty recalled a past memory, or even just narrated something that was happening in the present, she would conclude it by saying something like “This is real, I think. This is real. Though I am not sure that it is, actually.” (151) That is what drove me crazy, how after every story that she told she would say how she was not even sure that it happened. I felt like I was wasting my time reading tedious and very bitter accounts of a mad women who was not even confident in her own credibility.

I understand that being that The Gathering was a novel written in the first person that whatever was told is subjective. Reading Breakfast On Pluto it was quite easy to discern what Pussy was imagining and what was real, but where Veronica is concerned nothing she says is credible. Even the central plot of the story, the sexual abuse that Liam experienced as a child resulting in his suicide was put into speculation when Veronica stated, “I know that my brother Liam was sexually abused by Lambert Nugent. Or was probably sexually abused by Lambert Nugent.” (224)

While I truly did not like Veronica Hegarty and all her bitterness and hatred, I did find her to be quite interesting. This fascination in Veronica is stemmed from the belief that she was mad, or well on her way. Her inability to tell which way was up, what really happened and what she made up, which I believe I sufficiently explained above, was a sure sign of her psychosis, in my opinion. Another aspect that I found to be just as interesting was her bitterness and hatred toward almost everyone she new. Veronica’s bitterness toward her mother, a ''piece of benign human meat, sitting in a room,'' was based on the fact that she had “twelve children and…seven miscarriages. The holes in her head are not her fault. Even so, I have never forgiven her any of it. I just can’t…I do not forgive her the sex. The stupidity of so much humping. Open and blind. Consequences, Mammy. Consequences.” (7) At the wake Veronica accuses her ‘vague’ mother, who was so absent-minded that she was absent altogether, of the death of Liam. “The year you sent us away, your dead son was interfered with, when you were not there to comfort or protect him, and that interference was enough to send him on a path that ends in the box downstairs.” (213) Aside from blaming her mother, Veronica also blamed her father for the death of Liam, in almost the same way in which she blamed her mother, for having “sex the way his children get drunk – which is to say, against his better judgment.” (228) Veronica even went as far as to blame Ada Merriman, her grandmother, for marrying Charlie Spillane instead of Lambert Nugent, Liam’s molester “She did not realize that every choice is fatal. For a woman like Ada, every choice is an error, as soon as it is made.” (110) All of this blame, though some of it absurd, I believe was placed by Veronica in a way of hiding her own guilt in doing nothing about the molestation when she found out, except run upstairs to the bathroom “with an urge to pee and look at the pee coming out.” (146)

Veronica is suffocated with resentment of her parents for their prolific insensitivity, of her husband and siblings for their inability to share her despair and of herself for her inaction in being able to save Liam from himself. What I have discerned from all of this is that Liam’s death coupled with Veronica’s bitterness and hatred for almost everyone in her life has caused her to follow in her uncle’s footsteps and go mad.

*I apologize for any sort of confusion that my blog may have caused. In my defense I am very sick and on a couple medications, combine that with The Gathering and you have a very jumbled up blog that quite possibly does not make any sense. Sorry*