40 pages • 1 hour read
Anne EnrightThe Gathering
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 30-39Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 30 Summary
Veronica attends Liam’s wake in her mother’s house, where guests can view his body. Veronica’s siblings arrive and gather awkwardly. The only sibling who doesn’t attend is Alice. When their mother goes to bed, the siblings get drunk together. Veronica imagines seeing the ghosts of Ada, Charlie, and Nugent.
Chapter 31 Summary
On the night of Liam’s wake, Veronica and Tom have sex, which she says is for the last time. She believes that Tom loves her, but she has also long suspected him of infidelity.
Chapter 32 Summary
Veronica has a memory of holding Nugent’s penis and Ada walking in and seeing him sexually assaulting her. But Veronica can’t tell if this is a real memory or a vivid dream. She isn’t totally certain Nugent sexually abused her as he did Liam. She thinks, “I add it in to my life, as an event, and I think, well, yes, that might explain some things. I add it to my brother’s life and it is crucial; it is the place where all cause meets all effect” (224). Veronica now suspects that Nugent likely interfered with so many layers of Ada’s life that he can be blamed for many of the Hegarty family’s problems.
Chapter 33 Summary
At Liam’s funeral, Veronica thinks of her father. She remembers him hitting her once for asking an inappropriate question about the Virgin Mary. Veronica was pious as a child. But she wonders now if she ever truly believed in God.
Chapter 34 Summary
Chapter 35 Summary
Veronica finds evidence that Nugent owned Ada’s house, which would have given him power over her and Charlie. When she asks her mother which house she grew up in, her mother seems lost. Veronica wonders if her mother actually enjoyed having so many children because more children meant more of a future, which helped her escape her past.
Veronica figures that Nugent’s ownership of Ada’s house and his abuse of her children and grandchildren are signs of his resentment that Ada hadn’t chosen to marry him.
Chapter 36 Summary
Chapter 37 Summary
At Liam’s funeral, Veronica meets a woman named Sarah, whom she remembers as one of Liam’s girlfriends. Sarah introduces Veronica to Rowan, Liam’s three-year-old son. Veronica is filled with immediate love for Rowan. At the post-funeral reception, Veronica’s mother and siblings immediately know that Rowan is Liam’s son because he looks so much like Liam.
Chapter 38 Summary
Chapter 39 Summary
Veronica flies to England on an impulse. She thinks she wants to see Rowan, but she actually just wants to sleep. She checks into an airport hotel and sleeps. She thinks of her daughters and how much she loves them. She decides to tell Ernest about Liam’s molestation so that he can tell the rest of the family. Veronica wants to live her life well. Since Liam’s death, she’s been in an emotional tailspin, but now she wants to find her life again.
Chapters 30-39 Analysis
The final chapters of The Gathering emphasize The Complexity of Memory and transference. Veronica is enmeshed in grief and guilt over Liam, and she returns to her family history to make sense of the present moment. But Veronica’s desire to make sense of the present by turning to the past means that she conflates what she knows is real and what she suspects might not be. Veronica has a memory that could be a dream in which she, too, was molested by Nugent. Veronica wants to know the truth about the past “[b]ecause there are effects. […] [R]eal events have real effects. In a way that unreal events do not. Or nearly real. Or whatever you call the events that play themselves out in my head. We know there is a difference between the brute body and the imagined body” (223). Veronica can’t be certain about her own experiences with Nugent, which is either a sign of her repression of childhood abuse or an example of transference, in which she attempts to assuage her guilt over Liam by taking on his abuse as her own. Also notable is how tied these memories or fictions are to bodily experience. Veronica contemplates the difference between the “brute body” and the “imagined body” because the physical vessel of experience is tied to her emotional conflicts.
These chapters also emphasize the importance of setting. Place and environment are crucial to one’s sense of self, as is evident through several instances. First, Liam’s wake is held in his mother’s house, which is a callback to his childhood. Liam left Ireland for England as a way of escaping the past, but in his death, he returns to his ancestral home. Veronica also tries to escape from home only to discover that home is what she most wants. When she flies to England to take a break from the pressures she’s facing in Ireland, she finally comes to terms with her grief and her future. Veronica makes resolutions in England that she couldn’t make in Ireland because Ireland is too filled with memories and stories that cloud her self-analysis. By removing herself from such a loaded place, Veronica gives herself both physical and metaphorical distance to resolve her internal conflicts. Ada’s house also illustrates the importance of place. Ada’s house is the location of abuse, abandonment by Veronica’s mother, and a physical structure that symbolizes Nugent’s control over Ada and, by extension, the entire Hegarty family.
The novel concludes with the resolution of Veronica’s character development. Over the narrative she has been trying to figure out how to live without Liam and with the guilt of their childhood. Ultimately, Veronica decides to live well—for her children, but also for herself. By deciding to reveal the secret of Liam’s sexual abuse to the rest of her siblings, Veronica frees herself from her own guilt and shame by confronting it head-on. This allows her to reconsider her marriage as loving and her future as potentially happy.
Related Titles
By Anne Enright
