SOURCE: "Varieties of Disenchantment: Narrative Technique in John McGahern's Short Stories," in Journal of the Short Story in English, No. 13, Autumn, 1989, pp. 77-89.

Nightlines, the title of John McGahern's first collection of stories, (1970), promises a series of sombre narratives; Getting Through, the title of his second, (1978), connects communication with strategies of survival; High Ground, (1986), his most recent collection, hints at elevations of theme or perspective, but a perusal of the title-story reveals the ironies of eminence. John McGahern's short fictions are studies in disillusionment and its apathetic after-math, in alienated authenticity and the sad stoicism of the undeceived.

At first glance his fictional terrain may seem familiarly uncomfortable to readers of James Joyce, Frank O'Connor and Sean O'Faolain. Stories set in dreary, Irish provincial towns and villages or in the bars, dingy interiors and wet streets of Dublin. Unheroic white-collar heroes—teachers, police sergeants, civil servants, translators, failed...