SOURCE: O'Rourke, William. “Among the Lonely Souls of Ireland.” Chicago Tribune Books (14 February 1993): 1, 6.

In the following review, O'Rourke compares McGahern's The Collected Stories to the writings of D. H. Lawrence.

On the heels of William Trevor's Collected Stories Ireland sends us another, John McGahern's [The Collected Stories]. That has something to do with the age of both writers (Trevor was born in 1928, McGahern in 1934), but it is also due to the Irish affinity for the modern short story. The daddy of them all, James Joyce's brief 1914 collection, Dubliners, has spawned generation upon generation of short stories, in Ireland and in this country as well.

There are a number of crucial differences between the stories of McGahern and those of the more lionized Trevor. The subjects of Trevor's stories (especially those with Irish locales) are largely genteel, steeped in nostalgic disaffection and somewhat cosmopolitan, whereas McGahern writes about an...