The New York Times Book Review - David Leavitt
…an impressive novel that bounces its readers through some fairly rocky terrain, not the least of it the green road of the title, as [Enright] charts the fortunes and misfortunes (mostly the latter) of the Madigan family over a period of roughly a quarter of a century…Enright writes with authority and confidence not just about her native Ireland…but about the AIDS-stricken New York in which Dan is making his way and the poverty-stricken Mali where Emmet, the novel's unsparing voice of conscience, is going about the practical business of saving lives…The Green Road is, in the best sense of the word, a strange novel. Or perhaps I should say it's a novel that gets stranger and stranger as it goes along.
Publishers Weekly
★ 03/02/2015
The eponymous road of Enright’s flawless novel is in County Clare in Ireland, running from the impoverished farm of handsome Pat Madigan in Boolavaun, to a house called Ardeevin, where he wooed Rosaleen Considine, daughter of the town’s leading family. Pat and Rosaleen marry and have four children. A volatile drama queen, Rosaleen is the fulcrum about which her children warily move. Even as they mature and flee from her embrace, she exists in their heads, where they continue to blame her for their bad fortunes. In 1980, Rosaleen takes to her bed when Dan, the eldest and her favorite, announces his intention to become a priest. She is even more aggrieved when he abandons the priesthood for the art community in New York in the 1990s and eventually allows his true sexual nature to emerge in a series of ardent gay trysts. Enright (winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Gathering) writes of this time and place with crystalline clarity. The tone is much different in the chapters set in Ardeevin, where the lilt of Irish vernacular permeates the dialogue. Meanwhile Emmet, the second son, is engaged in relief work in Mali, trying to retain his sanity as the death toll from famine mounts and his girlfriend lavishes her love on a mangy dog. Hanna, his sister, is an aspiring actress and a drunk who confronts reality at 37, bitterly ambivalent about being the mother of an unplanned baby. The fourth sibling, Constance, who has married well and lives with her happy family in Limmerick, is her mother’s dogsbody and the unappreciated provider. This novel is a vibrant family portrait, both pitiless and compassionate, witty and stark, of simple people living quiet lives of anguish, sometimes redeemed by moments of grace. (May)
The Economist
"A book of brawny prose sheathed in cool intelligence."
The New Yorker - Louisa Thomas
"The story of an Irish family, [The Green Road] is the kind of book that refuses quick characterization: it is sprawling and intimate, anguished and hopeful, elliptical and intensely observed."
People
"With language so vibrant it practically has a pulse, Enright makes an exquisitely drawn case for the possibility of growth, love and transformation at any age."
The Times (UK) - John Sutherland
"Hugely readable…. The Green Road should confirm Enright’s status as one of our greatest living novelists."
O Magazine - Karen E. Bender
"Enright…is a master of emotional excavation. …Through her wise and majestic book, [she] shows us the beauty even in life’s harsh terrain."
Financial Times - Sue Gaisford
"Enright, newly crowned as the first Irish Fiction Laureate, has her own distinctive voice. She is witty, sharp, profound, perceptive and often very funny as she slyly undercuts her characters’ self-deceptions."
Ron Charles
"A rich, capacious story, buoyed by tender humor…. The Green Road…offers a survey of Enright’s magnificent dexterity…. There’s nothing she can’t do with perspective, tone and time."
Vanity Fair
"Gripping."
The New Yorker - James Wood
"Enright possesses an unusual combination of talents. She is a rich, lyrical prose writer, who cascades among novelties—again and again, she finds the unexpected adjective, the just noun."
New York Magazine - Boris Kachka
"This looping story of four siblings coping differently with the smothering embrace of their amusingly melodramatic mother…may be even better than its close cousin, The Gathering, which won the 2007 Booker prize. As locales shift from a stubby Irish village to AIDS-ravaged gay Manhattan and famine-torn Mali, so do the tone and point of view, over which Enright exercises perfect control."
Louisa Thomas - The New Yorker
The story of an Irish family, [The Green Road] is the kind of book that refuses quick characterization: it is sprawling and intimate, anguished and hopeful, elliptical and intensely observed.”
Library Journal
04/01/2015
"It's like there's some secret…but there just isn't," says Rosaleen's daughter. There is a problem, though. Rosaleen's adult children, for the first time in years, are gathering for Christmas in west Clare, Ireland. Rosaleen can't be made happy, and her children are far from trying anymore, if they ever did. Their own lives, which vary so much they seem to inhabit different eras as well as different countries, need tending. Dan is fearfully navigating early 1990s New York's AIDS-devastated gay scene and has found a love he can't even admit to himself is real; Hanna's acting career, which never really took off, is floundering; Constance's health scare underlines the isolation she feels in her marriage; and Emmet, the most distant of them all in every way, is exhausted by Ireland's excesses when he leaves his aid work in Mali. The family's stuttering reunion is capped by a surprise move by Rosaleen that breaks the tension and forces the children to see their mother and her choices in a new light. VERDICT Booker Prize winner Enright (The Gathering) lays bare the hopes, desperations, and all too brief moments of understanding in family and modern life. Her unsparing look at the difficulties of being in the world will appeal to lovers of literary fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 11/10/14.]—Henrietta Verma, Library Journal
JULY 2015 - AudioFile
Listeners follow the Madigan family as they cope with questions of self-identity, intimacy, and the matriarch's aging. Alana Kerr uses a light Irish accent to narrate the chapters about the widowed mother and her daughters, one a natural caregiver and the other who is battling personal demons. Soft-spoken Lloyd James and the gruffer Gerard Doyle narrate the sections about the brothers, one coming to terms with his sexuality and the other an aid worker in Africa. Sadly, this rocky novel is not helped by the audiobook production. In particular, the choice of three performers with disconcertedly mismatched accents for five characters from a single family is odd. Listeners would have been better served by a solo narrator or a male-female duo with similar accents. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2015-02-17
When the four adult Madigan children come home for Christmas to visit their widowed mother for the last time before the family house is sold, a familiar landscape of tensions is renewed and reordered. Newly chosen as Ireland's first fiction laureate, Enright (The Forgotten Waltz, 2012, etc.) showcases the unostentatious skill that underpins her success and popularity in this latest story of place and connection, set in an unnamed community in County Clare. Rosaleen Considine married beneath her when she took the hand of Pat Madigan decades ago. Their four children are now middle-aged, and only one of them, Constance, stayed local, marrying into the McGrath family, which has benefited comfortably from the nation's financial boom. Returning to the fold are Dan, originally destined for the priesthood, now living in Toronto, gay and "a raging blank of a human being"; Emmet, the international charity worker struggling with attachment; and Hanna, the disappointed actress with a drinking problem. This is prime Enright territory, the fertile soil of home and history, cash and clan; or, in the case of the Madigan reunion, "all the things that were unsayable: failure, money, sex and drink." Long introductions to the principal characters precede the theatrical format of the reunion, allowing Enright plenty of space to convey her brilliant ear for dialogue, her soft wit, and piercing, poetic sense of life's larger abstractions. Like Enright's Man Booker Prize-winning The Gathering (2007), this novel traces experience across generations although, despite a brief crisis, this is a less dramatic story, while abidingly generous and humane. A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.
