The front copy of the novel compares this novel to James Joyce’s Dubliners. High praise… and sort of stock compliments for Irish writers post-dating ole Jamesy. But, as I read through the first half of the book, I kept finding myself agreeing: “Yep,” I would say (inside my head, obviously, I’m not going to sit there, quietly reading a book, interrupting the quiet with an occasional outburst of commentary), “the way she writes description definitely evokes Joyce, especially his short stories like ‘A Painful Case’. The unreliable narrator recalls details which make the scenes spring out in your mind, fully-formed.” (Perhaps you can see why I’m not saying this stuff out loud… what an a—hole I’d sound like, eh?)

I like the unreliable narrator in this case. Her holey (and holy) memories begin to mount during the course of her trip to fetch her brother Liam’s body from England, where he committed suicide by walking into the sea. But as they mount, you get the sense that there is a vast gaping hole in the middle, over which she’d shoveled more memories, and some of them have to do with the event that she may or may not have witnessed in her grandmother’s front room tens of years before which may or may not have led Liam to his eventual destination. And I was fully satisfied that maybe this was the way it was going to end; the death of a brother with whom the narrator had been close and now was no longer (even before his death) leaving holes in the narrator’s sense of her history and now future, as she struggles to make sense of her own life in relation to her brother’s.

But at the funeral, the gathering of the title, well, that hole is filled in like the soul she begins making sense of somewhere in the middle… and well, then the novel revealed its own soul. And sang.

I could understand someone not making it as far as that, if they got bogged down by the description and fluttering about of the histories of her grandmother, grandfather, Lamb Nugent, mother, father, and siblings. Someone who got fed up with the itch that the holes in the histories were making. But I’d also say that sticking it through to the end is well, well worth it.

I was expecting, though I can’t recall why, now, to be blown away by Ken Bruen’s tough guy character Jack Taylor.

Well, I wasn’t blown away, which I guess counts as a disappointment. It was a fair enough book, a quick enough read, but it was missing… something.
Or possibly it wasn’t missing enough. Ken’s character seemed just a bit too introspective, a bit too philosophical for a tough guy trying to track down a priest’s killer who may or may not have been justified in the killing.

I have The Guards (the first in the Jack Taylor series, I believe) somewhere in my bookshelf, but after this one, I’m not in any hurry to go out and start on that one. Sure, I’ll get to it at some point, but I’ve got a Joe Lansdale, Robert Parker, Donald Westlake, and even a Benjamin Black to try out before I get back to ol’ Kenny boy.

I really, really enjoyed this book. I’d heard about the odd choice of point-of-view for the story, but it worked incredibly well.

The book is written in the first person plural, about which I initially (before picking it up) had misgivings. But it worked really, really well. Even when the fact that this somewhat different point-of-view faded into the background and the narrative rose to the fore it was the perfect way to tell the story Joshua Ferris cooked up.

It’s the book most people think they can write; those people sitting in an office all day with their cubicles and assorted cubicle flotsam keeping them company along with thoughts of escaping to another desk, at home, in front of a typewriter or computer. Or maybe a comfy chair at a non-closed Starbucks, pretending to write that next great American novel of the workplace and its soul-blanching tedium.

The characters Ferris assembled in this office, and the odd bond they share over the course of events (and non-events) captures exactly what a lot of these would-be novelists experience, and experience to such a degree that they feel compelled to comment on the circumstances.

So Starbucks or cubicled novelists, listen up! Stop! You’re going to have to write something else. Maybe about the pleasant people in Starbucks. Or how your writing is significantly different when you write down the street in the Dunkin Donuts because the coffee’s better (well, the sugar levels are better) and the atmosphere is completely different. Who knows? But Joshua Ferris has done a fantastic job, from start to finish how a lot of these things end… and he does it lyrically.