Irish eyes, American influence

Anne Enright is part of a remarkable generation of Irish writers who have helped transform their country’s literature as surely as globalization has transformed their nation’s economy. In some ways, the process has been remarkably similar -- an enthusiasm for and immersion in foreign influence carried home to make Ireland’s insularity no more than a geographic fact, at last.

Like her contemporaries John Banville and Colm Toibin, Enright has been particularly frank about the influence of American writers -- particularly Don DeLillo, in her case -- on her work. In fact, when he came to praise “The Gathering” as the finest of Enright’s four novels so far -- which it surely is -- Toibin adjudged her style “as sharp as Joan Didion’s; the scope of her understanding is as wide as Alice Munro’s; her sympathy for her characters is as tender and subtle as Alice McDermott’s. . . .”

High praise from a writer immune to Celtic extravagance, but others share the opinion, since “The Gathering” is on the shortlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize, which will be awarded later this month. It would be a worthy winner, since Enright has written a wonderfully elegant and unsparing novel that takes the old Irish subjects of family dysfunction and the vagaries of memory into territory made fresh by an objectivity so precise it seems almost loving in its care.

Veronica Hegarty is a prototypical new Irish wife and mother, prosperous with two small and loving daughters, a devoted husband, a suburban house with a new Saab in the driveway. Her own sprawling family is another matter entirely. Veronica is one of 10 living Hegarty children; two have died and seven miscarried in the womb. Her ineffectual father is long dead and her mother has receded into what seems a haze of post-procreative trauma. All of this is brought forcefully to the fore when Veronica’s favorite sibling, the alcoholic Liam, fills his pockets with rocks and walks into the sea at Brighton in one of his wasted life’s few well-planned, successful exercises.

From the moment she undertakes to tell her mother what has occurred, through Liam’s funeral and its personally traumatic aftermath, Veronica’s memories -- and life -- slowly dissolve into what might be called a haze of understanding, as she tries to work out her own past and that of her family. Liam and Veronica had grown particularly close and had come to share a corrosive secret while living for a time with their grandmother Ada, and as she pursues her own and Liam’s pasts, Veronica interweaves a half-imagined account of her grandmother’s life and of its intersection with her own.

Here is Veronica’s description of Liam -- recognizable to anybody who ever has dealt with that most frustrating of creatures, the smart and charming addict/alcoholic: “This was not the first time I left my brother, and it would not be the last. In his later, drinking years, I left him every time he arrived. But even before he hit the bottle, there were times when I just had to roll my eyes and walk away.

“The problem with Liam was never something big. The problem with Liam was always a hundred small things. . . . For someone who was blunderingly stupid most all of the time, my brother was very astute. And what he was astute about were other people’s lives, their weaknesses and hopes, the little lies they like to tell themselves about why and whether they should ever get out of bed. This was Liam’s great talent -- exposing the lie.

“Drink made him vicious, but even sober he could smell what was going on in a room, I swear it . . . because the place Liam worked best was under your skin.”

One of Enright’s great strengths is her ability to take the conventions, stage settings and stock characters of Irish fiction and dip them in the acid of a sensibility utterly immune to piety or cant, religious or cultural. This is work as suspicious of the newly unsentimental, tell-all Ireland as it is of the “Hidden Ireland’s” old reticence and verities. An experienced reader recognizes a lot of Irish types and tropes in an Enright novel, then realizes they’ve never seen them in this light before. Thus, while the now requisite, long-hidden sexual trauma seems to be near the heart of Veronica’s narrative -- and a slow deconstruction of memory and self -- there is too much ambiguity of cause-and-effect to turn recollection into diagnosis.

One of the small miracles of Enright’s prose occurs when her stunning control and flawless eye merge to create scenes in which emotional valence and ruthlessly edited physical detail invoke the simultaneity of inner and outer experience. Here, for example, is the appearance of the dead Liam’s young son, Rowan, in the hotel dinning room where his funereal lunch is being served:

“It is hard to describe the effect of the boy on the assembled Hegartys.

“ ‘Rowan?’ they say. ‘Rowan.’

“It is like we had never seen a child before. He has the Hegarty eyes, we say -- delighted, like they weren’t a curse -- and we look to see what human being looks out through them this time. It is too uncanny. Everyone wants to touch him. They just have to -- they reach out and he shies away; flinches, even. The one he chooses for safe haven is, of all people, Mossie, who sits him on one long leg and jounces him, hard, Ride a cock horse, threatening to spill him on to the floor. Mossie, who was for Liam a dark mirror, loves the boy and the boy loves him. Mossie’s own children gather round, and for the first time I see how happy they are -- that is why they are so well-behaved, with their gentle mother and their father who is firm but fair: they are content.

“This seems like an amazing thing to notice about your own brother, after so many years -- it is almost more amazing than the fact of Liam’s son. Maybe that is because the accident of Liam’s son is too fantastic to contemplate, in the middle of a hotel reception room, in the suburbs of Dublin, where two hundred people I sort of know are sitting down to soup or melon, followed by salmon or beef.

“We eat it all up. Down to the apple tart and ice cream. We do not stint. We put slabs of butter on bad white rolls, and we ask for second cups of tea. I am inordinately interested in the food. I look up from my plate to Rowan and then I look down again to jab a potato croquette.”

There’s a similar sensibility at work in the final sequence of what comprises Ada’s, the grandmother’s, part in Veronica’s inner exploration. Here, the handful of details manages to evoke with perfect pitch the sounds and atmosphere in Bewley’s, the wondrous Grafton Street coffee and tea shop that was a Dublin institution before the street outside was transformed into a vaguely Celtified version of Rodeo Drive. The focus, though, is Ada’s own emotional summing up, thinking about one man -- and then, the one she married: “If Ada had reached any sort of conclusion in this life, it was a little one. People, she used to think, do not change, they are merely revealed. This maxim she has applied, with the flattest satisfaction, to turncoat politicians, and unfaithful spouses, and wild boys who turned out right in the end. She applies it now to the memory of Charlie Spillane and to his true heart, that only became more intensely, and importantly true to her over the years. If people were only revealed by time, then the man who was revealed to her in Charlie Spillane was endlessly good -- just that -- with all his evasions and his regrets, his eye for a filly and for the main chance, the thing that her husband was had burned more clear for her, since he had died.

“It was a great mystery: goodness.”

The British bookmaker William Hill gives odds on the Booker Prize. As of Tuesday, “The Gathering” and Indra Sinha’s “Animal’s People” were at the rear of the field at a very long 8-1. There’s some sentiment that Banville’s recent win for “The Sea” makes the chances for another Irish winner longer still.

Prizes are what they are, but win, lose or draw, I wouldn’t ever bet against a novelist who -- having written a collection of essays on motherhood -- could put these thoughts about her children in the head of “The Gathering’s” Veronica:

“Are they good children? In the main. Though Emily is a bit of a cat and cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat.”

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com