SOURCE: Banville, John. “In Violent Times.” New York Review of Books 37, no. 19 (6 December 1990): 22–23.

In the following review, Banville examines the violence—both physical and emotional—in Amongst Women.

These three novels deal with violence, in one form or another. This is not the only thing they have in common. Indeed, there are more similarities than differences between them. However, one of them, Amongst Women, is utterly unlike the other two in one respect, that it is that rarest of things in contemporary fiction in English, an achieved and almost perfect work.

John McGahern was born in Dublin in 1934, the son of a policeman, and was raised in County Roscommon, near the border with Northern Ireland. After college he took up work as a teacher in Dublin. His first novel, The Barracks, was published in 1963. Two years later his second novel, The Dark, was banned by the Irish Censorship...