SOURCE: A review of Getting Through in The New York Times, July 12, 1980, p. 15.

Broyard is an American essayist and critic. In the following mixed review, he provides a thematic analysis of the short stories in Getting Through.

In the first story in John McGahern's Getting Through collection, a young woman who wants to write is obsessed by a Chekhov story called "Oysters." She keeps reconstructing it in her mind, altering it to her taste. As she sees it, an 8-year-old boy and his father are starving in the streets of Moscow, too refined to beg. The boy sees a sign in front of a restaurant that says, "oysters."

He asks his father what an oyster is. He has never heard of one. His father explains, and the boy imagines a frog sitting in a shell, starting out with great glittering eyes, its yellow throat moving. It squeals and...