The gathering

I'm still not sure why I finished this book. It took me over a month to read it because I could only stomach 5-10 pages at time before stopping to wonder if something, anything, interesting was going to happen or be revealed, ever. And even when the big revelation came, it's was no 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' surprise worth re-reading a hundred times to let it crush your soul again. I was never involved with the characters enough to care what happened.

Enright's tedious descriptions of the pedestrian details of daily life, even in her jagged style, come across as flatly uninspired. Sure, the story is successfully depressing; after all, it's about a disbanded family coming together for a son's funeral, but there's little to take away from the experience to render this novel more than a meager two stars.