In the three collections of stories published in the 1940s [Tales From Bective Bridge, The Long Ago and Other Stories, The Becker Wives and Other Stories], Mary Lavin established the emotional drama and technical strategy of her art. In story after story, the emotional ordeal of her characters is created out of the clash of opposed interests and sensibilities…. Gradually emerging out of these early stories, then, is the portrait of an Irish middle class peopled by lonely, sometimes bitter characters trapped by their own natures and their frustrated emotional needs. Within this portrait, Mary Lavin's characters act out their own individual failures or discover the terrible emptiness of their lives. (p. 25)

["At Sallygap"] develops several of the basic techniques of Mary Lavin's fiction. She often reveals the emotional reality of her characters by moving them from a fixed point in time, uneventful in itself, to a moment...