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.
From the Publisher
"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."— James Wood The New Yorker
"Impressive…Enright writes with authority and confidence…Though stories end, The Green Road seems to say, the lives of the people who inhabit them go on."— David Leavitt The New York Times Book Review
"Enright…is a master of emotional excavation. …Through her wise and majestic book, [she] shows us the beauty even in life’s harsh terrain."— Karen E. Bender O Magazine
"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."— Ron Charles Washington Post
"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."— Louisa Thomas The New Yorker
"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."— Boris Kachka New York Magazine
"Gripping."— Vanity Fair
"Hugely readable…. The Green Road should confirm Enright’s status as one of our greatest living novelists."— John Sutherland The Times (UK)
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.
PAPERBACK COMMENTARY
2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Short-listed
2016 ALA Carnegie Medal, Long-listed
2017 International Dublin Literary Award, Short-listed
