SOURCE: Wall, Eamonn. Review of Amongst Women, by John McGahern. Review of Contemporary Fiction 11 (spring 1991): 330–31.

In the following review, Wall offers a positive assessment of Amongst Women, calling the novel “one of the great works of Irish fiction.”

John McGahern and Brian Moore are pivotal figures in a quintet of Irish fiction writers (with Edna O'Brien, Aidan Higgins, and William Trevor) that emerged in the fifties and early sixties and who, by mixing modernist influences with native realism; have produced a new kind of Irish fiction. These writers have published some remarkable novels over the years, and have excavated Irish experience to depths that had remained unexplored since the death of Joyce. Both McGahern and Moore, in these new works, consider themes that have been present in earlier novels, though through slightly different lenses this time, and the results, in both cases, are remarkable.

Amongst Women, like The...