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Summary
Summary
The children of Rosaleen Madigan leave the west of Ireland for lives they never could have imagined in Dublin, New York and various third-world towns. In her early old age their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she's decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds.
Author Notes
Anne Teresa Enright (born 11 October 1962) is an Irish author. She received an English and philosophy degree from Trinity College, Dublin. Enright is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; her novel The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. She has also won the 1991 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the 2001 Encore Award and the 2008 Irish Novel of the Year. Enright's writings have appeared in several magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, the London Review of Books, The Dublin Review and the Irish Times. In 2015 she made the New Zealand Best Seller List with her title The Green Road. This title also made the Costa Book Award 2015 shortlist in the UK. It also won the Irish Book Award for Novel of the Year.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The eponymous road of Enright's flawless novel is in County Clare in Ireland, running from the impoverished farm of handsome Pat Madigan in Boolavaun, to a house called Ardeevin, where he wooed Rosaleen Considine, daughter of the town's leading family. Pat and Rosaleen marry and have four children. A volatile drama queen, Rosaleen is the fulcrum about which her children warily move. Even as they mature and flee from her embrace, she exists in their heads, where they continue to blame her for their bad fortunes. In 1980, Rosaleen takes to her bed when Dan, the eldest and her favorite, announces his intention to become a priest. She is even more aggrieved when he abandons the priesthood for the art community in New York in the 1990s and eventually allows his true sexual nature to emerge in a series of ardent gay trysts. Enright (winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Gathering) writes of this time and place with crystalline clarity. The tone is much different in the chapters set in Ardeevin, where the lilt of Irish vernacular permeates the dialogue. Meanwhile Emmet, the second son, is engaged in relief work in Mali, trying to retain his sanity as the death toll from famine mounts and his girlfriend lavishes her love on a mangy dog. Hanna, his sister, is an aspiring actress and a drunk who confronts reality at 37, bitterly ambivalent about being the mother of an unplanned baby. The fourth sibling, Constance, who has married well and lives with her happy family in Limmerick, is her mother's dogsbody and the unappreciated provider. This novel is a vibrant family portrait, both pitiless and compassionate, witty and stark, of simple people living quiet lives of anguish, sometimes redeemed by moments of grace. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Domestic fiction as a genre can often be humdrum in its intended goal of capturing the quotidian in family life, or it can be brilliant in its understanding of the exact point where, in family situations, the unique meets the universal. The latter speaks meaningfully and resonantly to all of us, regardless of a particular novel's setting and the specific circumstances from which the characters are derived. Enright, Irish winner of the 2007 Man Booker Prize for The Gathering and the first recipient of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for The Forgotten Waltz (2011), is appreciated by critics and the general reading public alike as a writer comfortably fitting into the latter category for her exacting yet luminous expressions of family dynamics. In her new novel, she explores a family composed of a mother and her four children as the two boys and the two girls grow up and leave the nest in the west of Ireland. From priest Daniel, who steps into New York's gay and art scene, to the staying-close-to-home Constance, facing the strictures of her own marriage and motherhood, Enright trails the Madigans over three decades, illuminating their trials and triumphs as reflective of not only their distinctive personalities and personal interests but also Irish society moving into the modern era of contraception, economic boom and bust, and open homosexuality. A final chapter, which gathers the now-elderly mother and her middle-aged children back to the family home for Christmas, places their individual lives back into a family perspective. High-Demand Backstory: Enright's stock continues to rise, and the list of the publisher's plans for marketing and publicity for her new novel is extensive.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
RECLAIMING CONVERSATION: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, by Sherry Turkle. (Penguin, $17.) Dialogue is a gateway to developing introspection and compassion, Turkle argues, but as technology mediates more of our conversations, our interpersonal and emotional skills have deteriorated precipitously. Turkle cautions against the unquestioning embrace of technology, calling instead for a return to face-to-face talks and more personal interaction. THE VISITING PRIVILEGE: New and Collected Stories, by Joy Williams. (Vintage, $16.95.) Gathered in part from her previous collections but including 13 stories new in book form, these tales exhibit Williams's trademark blend of grim humor and despair; in the title story, a woman finds unexpected solace in visits to her friend being treated for depression. The book amounts to what our reviewer, Ben Marcus, called "one of the most fearless, abyss-embracing literary projects our literature has seen." TRANS: A Memoir, by Juliet Jacques. (Verso, $19.95.) The author, who chronicled her sex-reassignment surgery and transition in columns for The Guardian, writes lucidly about her coming-of-age and experiences of feeling out of place. As she puts it, "I felt trapped not by my body but a society that didn't want me to modify it." AS CLOSE TO US AS BREATHING, by Elizabeth Poliner. (Lee Boudreaux/Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) Three Jewish sisters converge on a familiar summer destination, a stretch of Connecticut's coast known as Bagel Beach, and find comfort in domestic rituals, religion and one another. Poliner's wideranging novel, narrated by one of the sisters' children, flits back and forth in time over a nearly hundred-year period, with a family tragedy at the story's center. BIG SCIENCE: Ernest Lawrence and the Invention That Launched the MilitaryIndustrial Complex, by Michael Hiltzik. (Simon & Schuster, $18.) Lawrence, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, played a role in the Manhattan Project, and his inventions helped set a trend of enormous projects. But chief among his contributions was developing, as one admirer put it, "the modern way of doing science." By forging closer ties between science and politics, he helped make science far more interdisciplinary. THE GREEN ROAD, by Anne Enright. (Norton, $15.95.) The members of an Irish family, after years in far-flung locales, return for what might be a final Christmas holiday together. In this masterly novel, Enright, the 2007 Man Booker winner, writes as expertly about the AIDS crisis in New York and humanitarian work in Mali as she does about Ireland. THE NIXON TAPES: 1973, edited by Douglas Brinkley and Luke A. Nichter. (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $16.95.) In these illuminating transcripts, the president's words from a turbulent period speak for themselves. At the outset of this volume of the tapes, Nixon has won re-election but soon turns to obsessing over the gathering Watergate scandal and plotting his response. ?
Guardian Review
What the critics thought of Anne Enright's The Green Road, Gavin Francis's Adventures in Human Being and Sarah Blake's Mr West Some reviewers seemed to struggle for the words to adequately express the brilliance of Anne Enright's latest novel, The Green Road. "Enright's prose glitters and gleams like sunlit water," rhapsodised Charlotte Heathcote in the Sunday Express. "She is that rare thing: a very, very good writer," was Emma Townshend 's more straightforward verdict in the Independent on Sunday. "Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr faded to shadow. I was not distracted from reading a single word." High praise indeed. For the Observer's Alex Preston, however, the book would have worked better as a series of short stories. "The reunion at the end of the novel, and the dramatic disappearance that shuttles us through the final pages, feel like unnecessary MacGuffins, put there to appease the conventions of plot." Cristina Patterson, writing in the Sunday Times, was captivated. "The surgical precision of her writing can also make you feel that she can, in Wordsworth's words, 'see into the life of things'. There's a singing simplicity to it that can tug at your heart." But she, too, grappled to find quite the right word for Enright. "You can't really call a woman a master. A mistress seems to be something else. But I think Anne Enright is a master. She has certainly produced a masterly work." Garlands were predicted for Gavin Francis's "cultural map of the body" Adventures in Human Being. "So enthralling and so well written that it should win its own clutch of prizes," wrote Nick Rennison in the Sunday Times, who hailed the "frequent brilliance of Francis's prose, which can move seamlessly from clinical exactitude to poetry". In the Times, Melanie Reid described the book as "clever, strangely beautiful and definitely not for the squeamish", remarking that, just as neurosurgeon Henry Marsh's Do No Harm was shortlisted for many prizes, "Gavin Francis's book deserves the same." Robin McKie wrote in the Observer that: "In other hands, Adventures in Human Being might well have become cluttered with cliche, detail or sentimentality but Francis has a lightness of touch that helps him avoid these pitfalls." High-minded readers may be alarmed to note that the influence of the first couple of pop culture, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, has been beating an inexorable path from the pages of Heat magazine into the literary sections. Earlier this year saw the publication of Sam Riviere 's poetry collection inspired by the pair, Kim Kardashian's Marriage, and it seems that was just the beginning. Selfish, Kardashian's 350-page epic book of selfies, which is riding high on the bestseller charts on both sides of the Atlantic, was treated to a lengthy and enthusiastic review in the Telegraph by Riviere, who compared the Kardashians to the Brontes: "a family of creative women, in the business of conducting narratives in which men come and go, but female relationships remain constant and meaningful". Meanwhile, the New York Times ran a substantial review of Mr West, the first collection by the poet Sarah Blake, inspired by Kanye's relationship with his mother, Dr Donda West. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the lure of online clicks might have had something to do with it, particularly as the reviewer, Andrew DuBois, was not convinced of the collection's literary merit. " Mr West is a book that is in utterly good faith. That doesn't quite make it a good book, however."
Kirkus Review
When the four adult Madigan children come home for Christmas to visit their widowed mother for the last time before the family house is sold, a familiar landscape of tensions is renewed and reordered.Newly chosen as Ireland's first fiction laureate, Enright (The Forgotten Waltz, 2012, etc.) showcases the unostentatious skill that underpins her success and popularity in this latest story of place and connection, set in an unnamed community in County Clare. Rosaleen Considine married beneath her when she took the hand of Pat Madigan decades ago. Their four children are now middle-aged, and only one of them, Constance, stayed local, marrying into the McGrath family, which has benefited comfortably from the nation's financial boom. Returning to the fold are Dan, originally destined for the priesthood, now living in Toronto, gay and "a raging blank of a human being"; Emmet, the international charity worker struggling with attachment; and Hanna, the disappointed actress with a drinking problem. This is prime Enright territory, the fertile soil of home and history, cash and clan; or, in the case of the Madigan reunion, "all the things that were unsayable: failure, money, sex and drink." Long introductions to the principal characters precede the theatrical format of the reunion, allowing Enright plenty of space to convey her brilliant ear for dialogue, her soft wit, and piercing, poetic sense of life's larger abstractions. Like Enright's Man Booker Prize-winning The Gathering (2007), this novel traces experience across generations although, despite a brief crisis, this is a less dramatic story, while abidingly generous and humane.A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
"It's like there's some secret...but there just isn't," says Rosaleen's daughter. There is a problem, though. Rosaleen's adult children, for the first time in years, are gathering for Christmas in west Clare, Ireland. Rosaleen can't be made happy, and her children are far from trying anymore, if they ever did. Their own lives, which vary so much they seem to inhabit different eras as well as different countries, need tending. Dan is fearfully navigating early 1990s New York's AIDS-devastated gay scene and has found a love he can't even admit to himself is real; Hanna's acting career, which never really took off, is floundering; Constance's health scare underlines the isolation she feels in her marriage; and Emmet, the most distant of them all in every way, is exhausted by Ireland's excesses when he leaves his aid work in Mali. The family's stuttering reunion is capped by a surprise move by Rosaleen that breaks the tension and forces the children to see their mother and her choices in a new light. VERDICT Booker Prize winner -Enright (The Gathering) lays bare the hopes, desperations, and all too brief moments of understanding in family and modern life. Her unsparing look at the difficulties of being in the world will appeal to lovers of literary fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 11/10/14.]-Henrietta Verma, Library Journal © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
