The Collected Stories
Shannon, Elizabeth & McGahern, John
A CHILLING CLARITY THE COLLECTED STORIES John McGahern Alfred A. Knopf, New York, $24, 408 pp. Elizabeth Shannon 'hen John McGahern's first novel, The Barracks, was published twenty years...
...Memorial Award, McGahern has written three more novels, three collections of short stories, and one play...
...The language is sparse and justifies each word...
...Read them with the same clear eye of Mr...
...ILAN STAVANS is the author o/Imagining Columbus: The Literary Voyage (Twayne...
...You know that things will turn out all right for the couple in "Bank Holiday...
...In "High Ground," a bright young scholar, mourning the failure and subsequent alcoholism of a revered teacher, stops outside the pub one evening and overhears the teacher, in his cups, describing to his fellow drinkers just why, exactly, that particular village has produced such extraordinary intelligent men: "If you had to pick one thing, Master, what would you put those brains down to...
...Mr...
...Ah, we sigh...
...McGahern could have been describing his own stylistic skill...
...McGahern' s development will be well worth watching...
...Things are going to work out for them...
...And we're very high up here...
...GARRETT GREEN, author of Imagining God: Theology and the Religious Imagination (Harper), chairs the Religious Studies Department at Connecticut College...
...Never let them bully you with their assumptions of what you should be...
...He knows them well...
...happiness with a good and sensible neighbor, Mary Kennedy...
...ELIZABETH SHANNON is a long-time contributor to Commonweal...
...Undisciplined emotions spew out bitter, vindictive accusations...
...CATHERINE WALSH is an assistant editor of St...
...until Mary tells William with chilling finality about the old, loyal Kirkwood servant: "Annie May will have to be given notice...
...PAUL ELIE is a frequent Commonweal contributor...
...School teachers, country policemen, civil servants roam through McGahern's stories...
...His early promise is fulfilled...
...The failures of relationships are chronicled with spare and taut language...
...Elizabeth Shannon 'hen John McGahern's first novel, The Barracks, was published twenty years ago, a reviewer in the London Spectator said...
...Lives are ruined or made unbearable by long-held and well-nurtured grudges...
...The women in the stories, as in most of McGahern's works, are often victims or heroines...
...Ireland's landscape creates a stage of awesome beauty that gives a stoic dignity to the sometimes cruel and forlorn drama played out in its midst...
...He invites the disgraced manager to share his fireside on his first night in jail, and is sympathetic to his condition: "You'd think it was God Almighty we were offending...
...He might have added that each of his ensuing books would be well worth reading...
...But lest things become too good and endings become too cheerful, we are brought up short by William Kirkwood, the impoverished Anglo-Irish landownerturned-Catholic who finds middle-aged REVIEWERS CARL L. BANKSTON III, a historian and sociologist, teaches at Tulane University...
...There is humanity and compassion in 38 Casey, the policeman who has to arrest a creamery manager for embezzlement...
...The men whose lives they touch need them and want them, but they are watchful and wary of being hurt, of being left alone again...
...The owner knows they are there, but the pleasure of their luster is forgone...
...Their tragic exits, either by choice or by death, cause pain and suffering...
...39...
...What's an old creamery anyhow...
...they will marry and make each other happy...
...Then there's the trees...
...They had no choice...so that the brains was passed on to the next generation...
...If I had to pick one thing more than another, I'd put it down to that...
...Even if it meant saving his own life he'd never have been able to put the business so neatly without sidetracking or leaving something out...
...They appear as a litany in the early stories of this collection...
...Since the publication of The Barracks, which won the A.E...
...Youth and hope wither with boredom and drink...
...And William was left wondering whether "there was any way his marriage could take place without bringing suffering on two people who had been a great part of his life, who had done nothing themselves to deserve being driven out into a world they were hardly prepared for...
...The brother in "The Country Funeral" will leave the oil fields of Saudi and return to his family roots in Sligo and will be content there...
...Anthony Messenger and a free-lance writer...
...In "Strandhill, the Sea," Mr...
...Their wariness creates silence, leaves the crucial words unsaid, hidden, like jewels locked away in a bank vault...
...Never feel you have to know anything because you happen to teach...
...He has become one of Ireland's great contemporary writers...
...Bleakness and despair are the underside of the Irish character...
...And against the hopelessness there is always the nurturing land: the radiance of a sunset over bogs, the simple, satisfying pleasure of haymaking on a summer day, the power and majesty of the sea...
...MICHAEL O. GARVEY works in the Public Relations and Information Office at the University of Notre Dame...
...It' 11 still go on taking in milk, turning our butter...
...Well, the people with the brains mostly stayed here...
...Robust ambition is stifled by old cynicism...
...But just when the reader is about to abandon all hope along with McGahern's characters, the humor, black and ironic, jumps out to shake a fist defiantly at the gloom...
...The stories in this collection become happier as they progress, as if the author has become more optimistic...
...In one of these stories, the character admires the manner in which his brother stated the business of an uncle just-died to the family lawyer: "As he spoke, Philly marveled at his brother...
...No one writes about the emotional starvation of the Irish with more chilling clarity, and no one describes the beauty of the country more poetically...
...Ryan, a teacher, is held accountable for all knowledge until he is counseled by Ingolsby, a retired lecturer of English...
...These are wonderful stories...
...Say you don't know, that it can be discovered in books if they're interested...
...I'd attribute it to the high ground...
...There's the water...
...Only in law is it anything at all...
...We're practically at the source of the Shannon...
...It's only pretending to know something that's embarrassing...
Vol. 121 • January 1994 • No. 1
