A review of "The Gathering" — 2 years ago
Emphatically Not Worth Consuming. The only people I can imagine enjoying this are very muddled self-absorbed later middle aged women who have a lot of middle class guilt. The plot rambles, but not with any purpose in mind. I felt no affinity for any of the characters- and indeed the only one you actually know anything about is the narrator, and she’s unbearably irritating. Large portions of the book are devoted to the erections of virtually every man she’s ever seen, from her husband to her grandfather to some guy sitting next to her on a train, while the actual plot (the “gathering” of the title) takes only about 10 pages of the book. I’m all for novels about character exploration and development, but when the only real character is as boring as the one here, the explorations mostly don’t make sense and the development is questionable. Don’t bother.
