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 relished this book. In one way, it's a story in two halves - the earlier lives of four siblings and their mother: and then later, when this dispersed family returns for a family Christmas.

I loved the different voices in which this story is told. In part one, each chapter could stand as a self-contained novella. And each of the five characters is revealed not in a simple narrative, but through vignettes in which they may not even stand centre stage - the story of Dan is a particular triumph.

I loved the change of pace too. Those 'novellas' were rich explorations of five very different lives . But in the second part, the chapters become briefer, fractured, as the drama of unfolding events gathers pace.

We're left with a portrait of a disfunctional family unwittingly revealed with great clarity by the characters themselves. ( )

This review contains mild spoilers.

Anne Enright speaks in the authentic voice of each character in this book: a mother of grown children, a child (later an alcoholic mother and actress), a gay man, a missionary, and a responsible oldest daughter. Her expert shift from voice to voice, especially early in the book, is a pleasure.

The Green Road is a thoughtful exploration family dynamics, with the occasional passage that moves me to tears, rings with truth that transcends this story, or directs a laser focus into my own motivations.


( )

The Green Road is about a dysfunctional Irish family. It is split into two sections. In Part One, we meet each of the four children and the matriarch, Rosaleen. In Part Two, Rosaleen has decided to sell the family home, and the children return to their home town in Ireland to spend Christmas together. Frankly, I was perplexed as to what the author was trying to convey. The book covers so much ground so quickly that it is difficult to get to know the characters and understand what has led to the dysfunction. I enjoyed the second part much more than the first, once the story moves back to Ireland, where the author is clearly at home. Her descriptions of the Irish countryside are vivid, and the story gained momentum. To me, the ending was rather unsatisfying so it would be difficult for me to recommend it. ( )

The Green Road, by Anne Enright, is an introspective, remarkable, often poignant story about the four siblings of the Madigan family, and their mercurial, often tempestuous, aging mother, Rosaleen. Set primarily in Enright's native country of Ireland, the narratives of the four children sometimes wander from that green island to America and Mali, carrying with them the subterranean influences of their mother's influence.

This is a story about acceptance: of each other, of ourselves, of the places we inhabit. This could be anyone's story, and because of that Enright has succeeded in making a very specific story a common and relatable one.

The prose, while easy and straightforward, somehow is also quite precise and lush. She weaves description through the narrative with a deft hand, so that the reader is transported.

But the reader should be aware this isn't the sort of novel which immediately grabs you and hauls you into a consuming read. Rather, this is the type of novel to be read carefully, with commitment, working through the opening chapters with complete faith the author knows what's she's about, and will eventually have you quite absorbed and preoccupied with the world she's created.

Definitely a novel worthy of the literary accolades it's been accorded, and definitely a novel worthy of your time. ( )

What a wonderful discovery—the Irish novelist Anne Enright! I heard a talk she gave that I found among the London Review of Books podcasts. It was called “Adam and Eve and the Origin of Blame”. I have listened to it twice, appreciating the ideas and the wry wit of Enright’s delivery. That same wit is sewn throughout The Green Road.
This tale of a family, a matriarch and her four children, is funny and sad. Enright portrays the individuals acutely; they all lived vividly for me, coherent and unique. I thought the interactions among them were especially believable and the book became harder and harder to put down as it arrived at its conclusion. ( )

Should have been shortened to a short story- just meh ( )

I did not love this book. I read and listened. I loved the Irish accents, but I think that’s the last thing I loved. Ah well. They can’t all be winners. ( )

Oh, the beauty of sinking into seemingly effortless prose.
I am sorry. I cannot invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad.
Our Irish family story starts with young Hanna in County Clare in 1980 and Dan, the eldest, announcing that when he leaves university he will enter the priesthood, which makes his mother take to her bed for days.
We then move with Dan to New York’s gay scene in 1991, with death from incurable AIDS stalking the pages, evoked in a few spare scenes.
We return to Ireland and Constance, the older sister, going for a breast cancer check up in 1997 in County Limerick, all her close friends having moved away, but she is happily married with three children.
Then we catch up with Emmet, the younger brother, a foreign aid worker, loving and losing in Mali in 2002. He had returned home and nursed his dying father ten years earlier.
Back in County Clare in 2005, their mother, Rosaleen, is getting old and decides to sell the family home and the smallholding inherited from her husband. This is the catalyst for the Madigan’s Christmas family reunion.

The return to the family home by each sibling is carefully described, and then there is the surprise of Christmas Day. This is a brilliant set piece, which is followed by an open ending of sorts, with you wanting to know more of the lives of the Madigans, but leaving that to your imagination. ( )

Some excellent passages and interesting thoughts on family, togetherness, and identity. Enright is a master of the minutae; the story focuses on one family of four children from Co. Clare, Ireland, and their journeys through globe and life but is strongest in its small, banal observations. Slow beginning but overall this is a very enjoyable, thoughtful book. ( )

Could not finish. After 1st 2 lengthy chapters I had no desire to read more about this Irish Catholic dysfunctional family. The blurb says "indomitable matriarch" but so far she is just melodramatic. I need to care about a character to wade thru the muck with them. ( )

The children of Rosaleen and the late Pat Madigan have grown up and scattered from the nest. They have roamed near and far from their home; reaching Canada, third world countries and down the road in Dublin. After she announces that she wishes to sell the family home, the children, Dan, Emmet, Constance and Hanna are drawn back for one last Christmas. This final celebration with their challenging but difficult mother will bring to the surface the tensions that have always been there as the children face a change that none of them expected.

The quality of the writing is excellent, making it effortless to read. Enright has managed to capture perfectly the mood and moments of the era. The characters of the four children are briefly sketched in individual chapters before they are thrust together in the family reunion in the second part of the story, where the strains in the relationships are tested. If you are looking for a complex plot then this might not be the book for you as not a lot happens; just the deeply fragmented layers of family sagas. It did feel a bit clichéd though, otherwise it was a fine read. ( )

It was the characterization that struck me. Each of the characters is very different from the others, but it is wholly believable that they come from the same family. You can see how each of the five children would have developed the way they did. And, upon reflection, the ending is very good. Family is a bit of a myth, I am afraid. ( )

Classic Anne Enright in many respects. The characterizations are gorgeous and her ability to write the telling, minor details of a scene in a way that makes it come alive in surprising ways is as incredible as ever.

If anything, it was a bit too realistic, in that there was no real narrative arc. Difficult Mom/Rosaleen remained difficult in all the same ways, her children catered to or resisted her in the same ways throughout the book, things ended up pretty much where they started. This is of course exactly what happens in our actual lives, but in fiction one is accustomed to something happening. ( )

This is billed as a family-saga, but it often feels more like a linked-short-story sequence, as the viewpoint switches between Rosaleen Madigan and her four children in a series of extended vignettes spread over some twenty-five years. Even when she brings the family together, three-quarters of the way through, they all still seem to be living in their own bubbles, and the book is often more about what people don't tell each other than about how they interact.

But the vignettes are all very finely realised, with lots of telling observation: Enright is clearly up there with Alice Munro when it comes to short stories, and it almost seems like an irritating distraction that we have to map all these disparate people together into a coherent novel.

Enjoyable and rewarding. ( )

Anne Enright’s observant and compassionate depictions of family life have been amply and deservedly recognized with awards and acclaim. The Green Road is another example of her ability to stir up extraordinary drama and tension within a seemingly ordinary Irish household. The focus of this novel, which covers twenty-five years from 1980-2005, is the Madigan clan of Ardeevin, County Clare. Decades ago, Rosaleen Considine married Pat Madigan, who at the time was not regarded as a particularly good catch. Regardless, they endured and raised four children, and Enright’s main story follows the divergent paths chosen by Constance, Dan, Emmet and Hanna. Constance stays close to home, marries into the McGrath clan and raises a family of her own. Dan, after a brief flirtation with the priesthood, becomes a fixture in the 1990s New York gay scene, where the AIDS epidemic has left the people and the culture forever altered. Emmet sets out to save the world, working for an NGO as an aid worker in Mali and other impoverished African locales. And the youngest, Hanna, is living in Dublin, married to a television producer and getting occasional but unfulfilling work as an actress. The final section brings the story back to Western Ireland, where Rosaleen, now in her mid-70s—widowed, lonely, fragile—is joined by her offspring for Christmas. Enright’s characters are all grappling with challenging personal issues, facing tough decisions, questioning where life seems to be leading them, all of which exacerbate the tensions and resentments simmering among the family members. Enright excels at ensemble drama, putting people together in a room and shifting the narrative focus seamlessly from one consciousness to the next as characters observe one another, think about what’s been said and done, and consider their response. The book has a distinctly cinematic quality, relating its story from a variety of perspectives that often suggest a camera at work from different angles. Throughout, Enright emphasizes her characters’ flawed humanity, their sometimes selfish or pigheaded behaviour, their exasperation with and tolerance of each other’s failings, their readiness to forgive. It all makes for a heady and volatile mix, one that benefits greatly from its author’s appreciation of a broad range of human experience and remarkable capacity for empathy. ( )

Great read about the Madigan family. Mother Rosaleen, needy and infuriating her children. Gay Dan, who first says he wants to be a priest and then comes out in New York. Eldest daughter Constance, always busy and guilty. Enright writeswith witvand fine observation.

Marvelous. Beautifully written. So far, my favorite of the Man Booker long list. The Madigans are quite a family. ( )

The story of Rosaleen and her relationship with her 4 children captured in snapshots of their lives over the years. Lovely writing but a sad and lonely book. ( )

I liked this quite a lot -- I'm not always crazy about Anne Enright's work, but The Green Road really worked for me. The characters were all fully fleshed-out--I thought Dan and Constance were particularly well handled--and the second half of the book manages to have both an elegiac quality and a shot of sly humor. And as always with Enright, the writing is beautifully elegant. ( )

Longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize
I wasn’t familiar with Anne Enright’s work before I was given The Green Road as a gift. The synopsis sounds wonderful:
From internationally acclaimed author Anne Enright comes a shattering novel set in a small town on Ireland's Atlantic coast. The Green Road is a tale of family and fracture, compassion and selfishness―a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we strive to fill them.
Spanning thirty years, The Green Road tells the story of Rosaleen, matriarch of the Madigans, a family on the cusp of either coming together or falling irreparably apart. As they grow up, Rosaleen's four children leave the west of Ireland for lives they could have never imagined in Dublin, New York, and Mali, West Africa. In her early old age their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she’s decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds. Her adult children come back for a last Christmas, with the feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold.
A profoundly moving work about a family's desperate attempt to recover the relationships they've lost and forge the ones they never had, The Green Road is Enright's most mature, accomplished, and unforgettable novel to date.

I even saved it until I had to spend some time in an airport. It starts out pretty good, but quickly goes downhill in my opinion. The beginning and the ending are the best parts.
The story starts in 1980 with Hanna, seemingly the youngest of the Madigan brood. Mom Rosaleen has taken to her bed after the oldest, Dan, announces he wants to become a priest. The story then shifts to focus on Dan. It is 1991. He is living in New York. Not sure what his occupation is as the story is more about his life as a gay man and the AIDS epidemic more than anything. The next section focuses on Constance, stilling living in Ireland, in 1997. She is at a hospital to determine if the lump in her breast is cancer. The next shift is on Emmet, who is, I think, a missionary in Mali in 2002. As I read these sections, I felt that Enright kept the reader at arm’s length. Then the story jumps back to the Madigan home for Christmas 2005.
The father, who we don’t see much of, died ten years (I think) earlier. Rosaleen is the same melodramatic matriarch that she was in Hanna’s section. There are no explanations of how the four ended up like they did, which made me feel disconnected to the character’s problems.

I give The Green Road 2 out of 5 stars. ( )

A good read, but not memorable. The characters are all likable and believable. ( )

Domestic comedy and drama in a middle-class Irish family from County Clare, from 1980 to the early 2000s, focused upon a spirited but rather scattered matriarch and her four "high-functioning" children.

Here Enright deals with serious themes but maintains a light touch, which made reading this novel a pleasant experience for me. In particular, I really liked her depiction of the several gay characters. (It didn't bother me that the "The Green Road" is episodic in structure, and the first half of the book reads like a sequence of linked short stories.) ( )

The Green Road is a family narrative told through place and time. The writing demonstrates real lives filled with compassion and selfishness and effortlessly carries the reader forward. It is a thoroughly Irish book that considers issues both modern and traditional through that lens. Our Thursday night book group enjoyed it for a variety of reasons that led to a lively discussion. I found the writing style and the structure of the book the best aspects, even while some of the characters, not all, were somewhat opaque. The story explored both the gaps in the human heart and family tensions in our modern age.

The story unfolds over decades with the first half of the book constructed from vignettes that might stand on their own as short stories. These stories explore the lives of the children of Rosaleen, matriarch of the Madigans, a family on the cusp of either coming together or falling irreparably apart. Each of the four Madigan children and their mother Rosaleen receive a chapter of their own beginning with Hannah Madigan. Hannah's chapter focuses on a family member as a child and deals with her relationship with her father. She is traumatized by viewing the culling of a chicken for dinner on her grandmother's farm. Dan Madigan's story jumps forward to 1991 during his time in New York with his fiance as his repressed homosexuality comes to the fore during the AIDS epidemic. He gradually accepts his life and begins living in Canada with a life partner. Constance Madigan's chapter is based in 1997 Limerick and considers her domestic roles of mother and wife. She is seen balancing the concerns of her health that make her face her own mortality. Emmet has traveled to Mali in 2002 and works with impoverished children even as he is haunted by previous relief work he has been involved with. All the while his relationships are slowly deteriorating.

Rosaleen, in her early old age, announces that she's decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds. Her adult children come back for a last Christmas, with the feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold. The second part of the book focuses on this homecoming as the story comes together through a combination of memories and family interactions. This was the best section of the book for this reader. It is where the home becomes a character as much as the Matriarch and her children.

The book is a pleasure to read through the story of the family and the author's beautiful prose. The story about a family's desperate attempt to recover the relationships they've lost and forge the ones they never had becomes a profoundly moving work. ( )