SOURCE: "Sorrowful Pipings," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 3976, June 16, 1978, p. 663.

Below, Irwin explores the somber tone that permeates the short stories of Getting Through.

Most of these graceful, melancholy tales are set in Ireland. They deal in love, frustrated or misplaced, and in intimations of mortality. A lonely aging man advertises for a wife, but panics and runs away when the chosen woman suffers a heart attack. A priest, reminded by a trick of the sunlight of a funeral he attended thirty years before, confronts the prospect of his own end. In two of the stories the main character is James Sharkey, a schoolteacher, who appeared briefly in John McGahern's novel The Leavetaking. Here, as there, he is a sorrowful man, crossed in love, who sees his premature baldness as a first hint of death, and so wears a hat continually, outdoors, indoors, and even in church...