SOURCE: "John McGahern's Nightlines: Tone, Technique and Symbol," in The Irish Short Story, edited by Patrick Rafroidi and Terence Brown, Colin Smythe Ltd., 1979, pp. 289-301.

Thomas Kilroy, playwright and novelist, provided the critic of Irish fiction with one of those clarifying and organising generalizations which illumine much that one has almost unconsciously accepted, when he wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, March 17, 1972:

At the centre of Irish fiction is the anecdote. The distinctive characteristic of our "first novel", Castle Rackrent, that which makes it what it is, is not so much its idea, revolutionary as that may be, as its imitation of a speaking voice engaged in the telling of a tale. The model will be exemplary for the reader who has read widely in Irish fiction: it is a voice heard over and over again, whatever its accent, a voice with a supreme confidence in its own...