Our 21st-century way of life demands that we conquer all things in the least amount of time and with minimal inconvenience. As we see in television commercials, using good old-fashioned cash to purchase take-out food or movie tickets is outmoded and replaced by the swipe of a check card. Those who swipe are hip: They don’t slow down the sped-up flow of consumerism like the slogging cash-users do. Food preparation is performed with one goal in mind: Get it to the table as fast as you can. Therefore, three minutes is far too long to cook microwavable rice; the process has improved so much that we are now only inconvenienced for 90 seconds before our steaming-hot side dish is ready for our plates. Nearly everything with which we fill our medicine cabinets is available in ultra quick-dissolving strips — pain relievers; cold and allergy medicine; breath fresheners and teeth whiteners and digestive aids. Long gone are the days of waiting 15 minutes or so for our nasal passages to clear when we’re down with a cold. And finally, there is the Internet — that accommodating behemoth of instant and endless gratification that must provide us our desired information in two-tenths of a second or we begin to cuss our slower-than-molasses connection. 

In spite of our quick-paced living, we must insist upon moments that allow us leisure, contemplation, breadth. We then gain a respite from the hurly burly and find the space to explore our deepest imaginings. And so, it is in this mindset that we approach Irish author Anne Enright’s searing and distinct fifth novel “The Gathering.”

Winner of 2007’s prestigious Man Booker Prize, an annual contemporary fiction award presented to writers from the British Commonwealth and Ireland, “The Gathering” is the story of the Hegartys — a flawed Irish-Catholic family of 12 siblings, a “vague” and vapid mother and a long-dead father — and is narrated by 39-year-old Veronica. “The Gathering” is not a book that offers an intricate storyline or bothers with great explications of time or setting. Its plot, we soon discover, is undeniably spare: Liam, Veronica’s older brother, has died, and she must travel to Brighton, England, to identify Liam and bring his body back to Dublin for burial. It is 1998, and the responsibility of tidying up the remnants of Liam’s life falls on Veronica since she is the “careful one” in the muddled Hegarty family and the one who was closest to her willful and troubled brother. Something happened to Liam when he was 9, and Veronica is the only one who knows about it. She’s kept it secret for more than 30 years.

Yet, none of these ostensibly pessimistic attributes doom “The Gathering.” It doesn’t intend to be an epic work. It doesn’t need to: Its sparsity is its success. It ruminates and meanders; it insinuates and challenges. And, it’s the kind of book that comes at us slowly, steadily — and fiercely. 

As Veronica goes about the business of burying her brother, she recalls the rough upbringing in the Hegarty household where “family tears meant nothing… They were just part of the general noise.” She acknowledges the ever-present distance between her and her husband, Tom: “I do not believe in Tom beside me [in bed]: that he is alive…. Or that he loves me. Or that any of our memories are mutual. So, he lies there, separate, while I lose faith.” She conveys the physicality of her sorrow: “I am a trembling mess from hip to knee. There is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig my fists between my thighs. It is a confusing feeling — somewhere between diarrhoea [sic] and sex — this grief that is almost genital.”

She remembers the gaze of Liam’s eyes one summer day when he was 14 and she was 13 as she catalogs the anguishes of Liam’s life: “He gives me a look from a distance that I do not know how to cross. Now I know that the look in Liam’s eye was the look of someone who knows they are alone. Because the world will never know what has happened to you, and what you carry around as a result of it.”

It is by way of these confessional reminiscences, which drive the story’s narration, that Veronica frames her interpretations. Her biting and idiosyncratic phrasing bumps up against unflinching meditations on sex and its various acts and consequences, which then lead to musings on the trustworthiness of memory and belief in that which is real — conclusions and limitations on possibilities that Veronica herself is hesitant to accept as true. Again and again, Veronica concedes that she could be imagining her entire story: “I’m not sure if it did really happen,” “I doubt all this can be strictly true,” “This comes from a place in my head where words and actions are mangled. It comes from the very beginning of things, and I can not tell if it is true.” Unlike other novels where an unreliable narrator infuses suspicion, Veronica’s lack of clarity inspires curiosity. We are led to imagine the truth of what she says.

“The Gathering” calls for our patience and perseverance. There’s much that may seem evanescent, even elusive. But stick with it, we must. For there are passages that are so powerful and precise they necessitate, and ultimately benefit from, a second, third — indeed, a fourth — reading. Enright’s prose is deceptively simple. There is no grandiose phraseology, and her words are of the everyday. What constitutes Enright’s supreme talent are the layers of thought and feeling that she builds with her uniquely crafted style.

So then, silent your cell phone or BlackBerry® and put them out of view. Resist your computer and television remote control — it’ll only be for a little while. Carve out a segment of time from your day and begin “The Gathering.” Discover the ways Enright constructs certainty into this most astute insight: “We are all human beings in the raw. Some survive better than others, that is all.”

 Amy O’Loughlin is a native of Clinton and a regular columnist for MotherTown.