Too close to home
On May 24, the front page of the newspaper featured photos of Dublin as I rarely see or imagine it, sunshine lighting up rainbow flags and jubilant couples of all gender combinations. Ireland had just become the first country in the world to approve gay marriage by popular vote. Ireland, of all places. So much for the gray mist, the supposedly built-in conservatism, the divorce law passed only grudgingly in 1995, the women still forced to take the ferry to England for safe and legal abortions. So much for the condoms confiscated at the Dublin port until 1980. Mothers of eight with their bags seized and the contraband rubbers dumped out. When the law changed decades ago, many Irish were scandalized that they could buy condoms at a pharmacy.
Times have changed, but the “yes” vote for gay marriage still seems somehow implausible. It is no doubt testament to hours and years of organizing, a long campaign that ended in a victory too late for many Irish men and women: those who lived in denial, those who emigrated so they wouldn’t have to, those who were bullied and attacked and sometimes killed.
The “yes” vote came too late for Dan Madigan, the most personable character in Anne Enright’s new novel. “The Green Road” is a meditation on the Irish family, Enright’s great subject. At the beginning, Dan announces at the family dinner table that he intends to become a clergyman. His mother retreats to bed to mourn the news, wailing that one of her four children will never provide her with grandchildren. This is not her first recourse to the “horizontal solution.”
But Dan turns out to be a “spoilt” priest, one who never makes it to the seminary. Instead, he moves abroad, to live the kind of life he cannot in the Ireland of the ’90s. When he returns in 2005 for a singularly awful family Christmas, he tells Hanna, his youngest sister, that he is getting married. She replies, “Oh God Dan are you? ... Why?” He objects, giving her time to regroup. “Sorry. Sorry, I mean, who is the guy?” Dan is among those who emigrated.
The novel centers on Dan, his three siblings and their unpleasant and often hysterical mother, Rosaleen, who raises them in East Clare — a rural and rugged part of western Ireland. (The father is there, and then he is dead, but he is in any case incidental.) There is Constance, the eldest; Dan, the charmer; Emmet, the dry one; and Hanna, the baby. There are a few, beautiful childhood scenes, and then the siblings are spun out into the world, as if by a centrifuge, perhaps propelled by their mother’s disappointment in them. Emmet works at NGOs around Southeast Asia and Africa, where he tries to clean up the devastations of hunger and poverty.
Dan washes up in a New York City gay scene ravaged by AIDS. Rosaleen is furious that her sons live so far away, that they don’t write and they don’t call. Hanna tries to act, then turns to the bottle, alarming the father of her new baby. Constance tends the counter at a pharmacy in Dublin, “and every customer who walked in the door came in with a look on their face and a prescription for condoms folded four times. They came in to town so their local chemist would not know.”
She later marries a local boy in Clare, a choice her mother calls “eccentric,” despite the fact that it is quite the opposite. Far is not good for Rosaleen, but neither is near. Two and a half decades after the book begins, Rosaleen threatens to sell the family house in East Clare, so for Christmas the siblings converge on home for the first time in their adult lives.
Each section is told in close third person, following the perspective of one of the siblings. Enright’s writing is by turns lyrical and aphoristic, depending on whose story she is entering, but she never loses the fine sense of irony that is a thread throughout her work. Each of the stories is convincing. Emmet’s stint in Mali with a troubled girlfriend, her adopted dog, and a Muslim servant could easily stand alone.
But together, the multiplicity of voices somehow dilutes the novel. The problem may be that old scarcity of contraceptives. There is one too many brothers and sisters for the story, let alone for the family to come together. The four siblings lead such separate and different lives that it is a shock to find them all together at the end, gathered for a Christmas reckoning. This is no doubt a hyperrealist depiction of many family holidays. But still, it makes for fragmented reading.
The fact that Rosaleen has such difficult relationships with not one, but four very different children tempts us to dismiss her as a nasty piece of work. At the beginning of the novel, Rosaleen takes to bed ostensibly to mourn the fact that Dan will never marry a woman and have children — but she also seems to be mourning his tacit admission that he is gay. At Christmas, so many years later, the family uneasily celebrates Dan’s engagement, providing that his boyfriend and gay life stay remote abroad. If Rosaleen were registered this May, no doubt she would have cast a “no” vote — as she seems to on most aspects of her children’s lives. No Christmas miracle can stitch this family back together again.