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A review by ddejong
The Green Road by Anne Enright
4.0
A strange byproduct of my experience with this book was that I finished it and felt steadily more furious about Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread making not only the Man Booker longlist but also the shortlist while this novel didn't make the second cut. Anne Enright's far superior writing - both prose and plot - and the rich complexity of the Madigan family on display in this book just made Tyler's family novel even more woefully simplistic and wooden by comparison. We first experience the Madigans together briefly in the beginning of the novel but then the four children scatter into adulthood and each chapter is focused on one of them for a while. The siloed approach to telling each of their stories made the latter portion of the book when all of the grown children are home again together that much more satisfying for me. I found myself experiencing something akin to relief to have them all together again.
Enright operates in a relatively dark place--this book does not have the same level of darkness as her Man Booker Award winner, The Gathering, but it is still very bleak in many places and her characters are all tortured and intermittently grief-stricken in their own ways. Enright's ability to paint a scene - whether eventful or mundane - in rich detail is one of the major reasons I loved this novel. The chapter dedicated to Constance waiting for a breast exam and then waiting to find out if she has cancer was so poignant for me having personally spent far too much time sitting in radiology waiting rooms and then waiting for ultrasound results. I thought Enright captured the emotion and fear and vulnerability of this situation flawlessly and in a way that felt almost intrusively personal. The chapter about Dan Madigan during his early time in New York in the midst of the AIDS epidemic with gay men dying left and right was an admittedly hard and uncomfortable chapter to read but I forced myself to digest it slowly and just sit with it rather than racing through. When the Madigan children are all together again at Christmas towards the end of the novel, Enright's talent for capturing complex family dynamics is on full display. I actually went back and re-read a large portion of this section after finishing the book because one time through didn't feel like enough. I did feel like the ending of this book was a bit weak and unsatisfying--things got a little strange, the book lost its momentum, and the plot sort of stumbled abruptly and awkwardly across the finish line. Nevertheless, I think it's a great work of literature and it was entirely deserving of making it onto the MBA shortlist. (Still bitter.)
Enright operates in a relatively dark place--this book does not have the same level of darkness as her Man Booker Award winner, The Gathering, but it is still very bleak in many places and her characters are all tortured and intermittently grief-stricken in their own ways. Enright's ability to paint a scene - whether eventful or mundane - in rich detail is one of the major reasons I loved this novel. The chapter dedicated to Constance waiting for a breast exam and then waiting to find out if she has cancer was so poignant for me having personally spent far too much time sitting in radiology waiting rooms and then waiting for ultrasound results. I thought Enright captured the emotion and fear and vulnerability of this situation flawlessly and in a way that felt almost intrusively personal. The chapter about Dan Madigan during his early time in New York in the midst of the AIDS epidemic with gay men dying left and right was an admittedly hard and uncomfortable chapter to read but I forced myself to digest it slowly and just sit with it rather than racing through. When the Madigan children are all together again at Christmas towards the end of the novel, Enright's talent for capturing complex family dynamics is on full display. I actually went back and re-read a large portion of this section after finishing the book because one time through didn't feel like enough. I did feel like the ending of this book was a bit weak and unsatisfying--things got a little strange, the book lost its momentum, and the plot sort of stumbled abruptly and awkwardly across the finish line. Nevertheless, I think it's a great work of literature and it was entirely deserving of making it onto the MBA shortlist. (Still bitter.)