John McGahern's significance to contemporary Irish literature was stated by Belfast novelist Glenn Patterson. When asked whether McGahern was his father, Patterson replied: "Yes. He is the father of the modern Irish novel." The status of McGahern as the most important novelist in the generation of Samuel Beckett seems undisputed, but Denis Sampson argues in his 1993 monograph on McGahern that even though he is perceived as a major artist, he is still underrated. According to Patricia Boyle Haberstroh in her DLB 14 entry on McGahern, "John McGahern's fiction continually tempts critics to compare him with other novelists." As an Irishman, he has experienced the inescapable comparison with James Joyce. Recent studies have compared him with Patrick Kavanagh and William Butler Yeats, who is, in fact, McGahern's most important model. McGahern has also been linked with Ernest Hemingway, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Francois Mauriac, Anton Chekhov, and Albert Camus. These comparisons pay tribute to McGahern's artistic achievement, but they also obscure the essential originality of his personal vision and style.
