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3.53 AVERAGE
3.53 AVERAGE
emotional
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This family drama concerns the Madigans, a 21st centurt Irish family whose four children are coming home from far flung places to visit their mother, Rosaleen, for Christmas. Rosaleen has hinted that she is going to sell the house they all grew up in, so there is some consternation among the siblings, Dan, Emmet, Constance, and Hanna. We get to see the siblings as children together, and then individually as adults, before we see them back together as a family. We see their weaknesses and faults, their attempts to manage their relationships with their mother and siblings, and where the family rifts are. Rosaleen is a formidable character herself, with the power to raise storms within her family and then quiet them. If you like complex family relationships, this is a great book for you.
is there a single decent family in all of ireland?
There's a certain type of movie that gets referred to as Oscar bait—a film that panders to ideas of what a good movie "looks" like, with lavish period costuming or a depressing but unchallenging treatment of some important issue or a beautiful actor who is bold enough to wear a prosthetic or gain 5kg for a role. The Green Road felt like Booker bait.
I went back and looked at some of the mainstream reviews for this book when it was first published. The Irish Times called it "Irish, or rather Irish-novelly, [in] an unashamed fashion", but is so in order to play with technique and sensibility; the Guardian opined that Enright was "playing with our expectations of what an Irish novel should do", that she "[treads] that line of Irish literary cliche with delicious knowingness."
Enright might be aware that she's working with clichés, but I have to disagree with those reviewers that she does so well. There's no subversion here, nor even the deftness of touch that could breathe fresh life into the emotionally repressed Irish Catholic family pre- and mid-Celtic Tiger. The main characters all have one defining feature—the Narcissist Mother, the Gay Son, the Self-Righteous Son, the Alcoholic Daughter, the Fat Daughter—and tend to (re)act like Literary Characters, not people. This sits oddly alongside Enright's clear insistence on realism in things like the big Christmas Day fight, where half the dialogue are the kinds of non sequiturs you get when what people are really fighting about is things that have been festering for twenty years that they might not even have articulated to themselves. That disjointedness is apparent elsewhere in the book. When Enright is writing about what she knows, she's capable of passages of startling perceptiveness: her description of the behaviour on Christmas Eve in a rural pub in the boom years was spot on, ditto her account of an Irish supermarket on the same day. But as soon as she's outside of personal experience—the chapter set in the NYC gay community of ca. 1990, the chapter set in Mali in ca. 2005—it's at best stagey and mostly distasteful.
It all felt a bit cynical to me but hey, it won Enright awards, so I guess she knows what she's doing.
I went back and looked at some of the mainstream reviews for this book when it was first published. The Irish Times called it "Irish, or rather Irish-novelly, [in] an unashamed fashion", but is so in order to play with technique and sensibility; the Guardian opined that Enright was "playing with our expectations of what an Irish novel should do", that she "[treads] that line of Irish literary cliche with delicious knowingness."
Enright might be aware that she's working with clichés, but I have to disagree with those reviewers that she does so well. There's no subversion here, nor even the deftness of touch that could breathe fresh life into the emotionally repressed Irish Catholic family pre- and mid-Celtic Tiger. The main characters all have one defining feature—the Narcissist Mother, the Gay Son, the Self-Righteous Son, the Alcoholic Daughter, the Fat Daughter—and tend to (re)act like Literary Characters, not people. This sits oddly alongside Enright's clear insistence on realism in things like the big Christmas Day fight, where half the dialogue are the kinds of non sequiturs you get when what people are really fighting about is things that have been festering for twenty years that they might not even have articulated to themselves. That disjointedness is apparent elsewhere in the book. When Enright is writing about what she knows, she's capable of passages of startling perceptiveness: her description of the behaviour on Christmas Eve in a rural pub in the boom years was spot on, ditto her account of an Irish supermarket on the same day. But as soon as she's outside of personal experience—the chapter set in the NYC gay community of ca. 1990, the chapter set in Mali in ca. 2005—it's at best stagey and mostly distasteful.
It all felt a bit cynical to me but hey, it won Enright awards, so I guess she knows what she's doing.
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Initially I found the structure of this novel a little difficult to get used to and, while I love Enright's writing, I'm still not completely sure that this worked in it's entirety.
Having said that, the second part of the novel pulls together brilliantly and the whole text is littered with the kind of beautifully crafted lines that are utter gems.
Parts of it can be a little close to the bone for those of us with difficult mothers, but her portrayal of a diverse and scattered family who come together after many years is honest and lucid.
Having said that, the second part of the novel pulls together brilliantly and the whole text is littered with the kind of beautifully crafted lines that are utter gems.
Parts of it can be a little close to the bone for those of us with difficult mothers, but her portrayal of a diverse and scattered family who come together after many years is honest and lucid.
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Some interesting family dynamics but basically had to force myself to finish
omg. This book was so frustrating. Moments of beautiful figurative writing (which is what kept me giving it a chance all the way through) but the characters, story contruction/progression just could not be saved by that. This is an attempt at a profile of a single modern-day Irish family, the 3rd person narration of a single family member each chapter left me wondering "where are we going with this?" and "why do I care about these people?". No central hinge of conflict or story core to hold it all together. The final chapters where something does "happen" and we are supposed to (I assume) reach some fundamental understanding of this family, fizzle away into a final chapter that ends the story without even a whimper or sense of ending (I quite literally shouted "Thats it?" in the car once I heard the credits for the audio book).
This book was totally not what I expected it to be.
I'm sorry but for me the story seems boring, like nothing really happens and the "last feast" which sounds like a big event, felt so ... small and not relevant in the end. For me it was hard to read, the narration and pacing wasn't for me.
Plus the way gays are represented and described in the book - at least in chapter 2 - ... I don't know, man, seems a bit stereotypical
I'm sorry but for me the story seems boring, like nothing really happens and the "last feast" which sounds like a big event, felt so ... small and not relevant in the end. For me it was hard to read, the narration and pacing wasn't for me.
Plus the way gays are represented and described in the book - at least in chapter 2 - ... I don't know, man, seems a bit stereotypical
The second on my Man Booker reading list. Much better than Obioma. Enright really knows what's she's doing. I doubt she'll win a second Man Booker Prize but I'd be surprised if she doesn't make the shortlist.