MixedBookslutLike many of her novels, The Gathering reads like Enright takes a coherent story, disassembles the plot first, then pieces everything back together a second time. With more than one narrative thread, she stitches the story together with imagined histories, feathery tufts of ruminitions, and sharp flecks of poetry. The ensuing result is a disorienting, hardscrabble, but extremely pretty read … But by the time you find out what Veronica may have witnessed about her brother in her grandmother’s house years ago, you wonder if it even really matters. It’s one of the predicaments of reading Enright that I’ve never really resolved: her prose can be so gun-slingingly sublime, but the narration is often so footloose that it almost overrides the plot and characters themselves.
