SOURCE: "A Lifetime of Tales from the Land of Broken Hearts," in The New York Times Book Review, February 28, 1993, pp. 1, 27.

Humphreys is an American novelist and essayist. In the following positive assessment of The Collected Stories, she provides an overview of McGahern's plots and characters.

One way to approach a story is to think of it as the writer's response to the most important question he can ask. The response is often complex, ambiguous and changeable, but the question is simple and almost always the same. The bigger the question, the riskier the fiction. In the story "Bank Holiday" in John McGahern's Collected Stories, a 50-year-old man tells the woman he loves, "I find myself falling increasingly into an unattractive puzzlement, mulling over that old, useless chestnut, What is life?"

That's Mr. McGahern's chestnut—the biggest. Old indeed, but useless only to those who are stupid or happy...