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. ( )