SOURCE: A review of The Collected Stories, in America, Vol. 169, No. 3, July 31-August 7, 1993, pp. 20-2.

Grennan is an Irish poet and critic. In the following review, he examines McGahern's fiction, terming it "essential reading for anyone interested in the interior life of modern Ireland, in modern fiction, in the short story, in good writing."

The voice that tells these splendid stories—and in so many of them it seems to be the same slightly mournful but unflinching voice—wells up out of modern Irish consciousness itself, carrying with it such central issues as displacement (often from country to city), social and spiritual rupture and chronic loss. To deal with issues of such weight, McGahern has forged a style of extraordinary fidelity to the facts, both the external facts of the phenomenal world and the internal facts of a painfully alert consciousness. In many of his stories, the experience...