Anne Enright’s ‘The Green Road’ is a brilliant, must-read novel of family relationships

This could be the shortest review I’ve ever written: “Anne Enright’s The Green Road is brilliant. Read it. The End.”

Rosaleen Considine Madigan is an elderly Irish widow with four children, “all contending in various ways with the emotional tyranny of their never-satisfied mother.” (Ron Charles, The Washington Post, 5/5/15)

Enright clearly understands the push-pull of the relationship between aging parents and their adult offspring: the undercurrent of fear and need on the part of the parent; the children’s sense of duty as well as their need to live their own lives. This relationship is more fraught if the parent is, and has always been, manipulative, demanding, and critical.

Neither does Enright shy away from the physical and mental decline of the sick and dying. A little girl is asked to go to the pharmacy for a cream for her grandmother. She suspects it has something to do with