[Conarroe is an American critic and educator. In the following favorable review of High Ground, he compares McGahern's short stories to the work of several highly accomplished modern authors. ]

John McGahern, the author of such highly regarded novels as The Pornographer and The Leavetaking, has been called an Irish Chekhov, and one does find in his understated prose a fusion of high seriousness and low comedy, of heartbreak and heartburn, reminiscent of the Russian master. Other writers are brought to mind too by his fine new book, High Ground, a collection of stories. When his characters engage in hostile wordplay, the potential violence barely held in check, they sound like Pinter people. The dreamy men and practical women are cousins to Sean O'Casey's strong Junos and inept paycocks. Many of the characters, moreover, paralyzed by convention and habit, are unable to escape their parochial fates; their powerlessness suggests a central motif in James Joyce. (Mr. McGahern's men are also sometimes paralyzed by strong drink; these are hearty fellows who prepare for a night of serious imbibing by inhaling three quick whiskies.)

The one explicit literary allusion in the book, curiously, is not from O'Casey or Joyce but from A. E. Housman. The title character in "Eddie Mac" is a soccer hero who is chaired "shoulder high" from the field following some glorious exploits, and the reader remembers "To an Athlete Dying Young":

The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

In a later stanza Housman describes the nature of disenchantment:

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eddie Mac does indeed slip away, literally, stealing some valuable property from his employer and leaving his pregnant sweetheart to fend for herself, his former heroics long since turned to ashes.

Loss and betrayal are Mr. McGahern's great themes, and several of the stories are calculated to discomfit an attentive reader. (The compressed prose, every rift loaded with ore, must be read as deliberately as lyric poetry.) In "The Conversion of William Kirkwood," one of two especially impressive tales, the man who has taken in Annie May, Eddie Mac's abandoned lover, and raised her daughter to young womanhood is engaged to a woman who suddenly announces that "Annie May will have to be given notice." This prospect sets up the realization that the marriage cannot take place "without bringing suffering on two people who had been a great part of his life, who had done nothing themselves to deserve being driven out into a world they were hardly prepared for." If stories can break hearts, this one will.

A second moving story, "Oldfashioned," treats another of the author's obsessive themes, the conflict between fathers and sons. The tale, rich in characters and plot development, would have emerged, from a less laconic writer, as a novella or even as a full-blown novel. A sensitive working-class lad becomes a kind of adopted son to a wealthy couple who want to sponsor him to Sandhurst, the famous military academy, so he can prepare for a career in the British Army. The boy's real father quickly and violently deflates the dream: "Well, then. I have news for you. You're going to no Sandhurst whether they'd have you or not, and I even doubt if the Empire is that hard up." Much later the son makes a series of documentary films "about the darker aspects of Irish life," even though the people that really interest him are "all dead." It is tempting to find an autobiographical source in this narrative, but if works like Philip Roth's brilliant novel The Counterlife haven't taught us not to confuse fictional characters with their creators, then we are beyond hope of education.

In addition to the struggle between rigid fathers and their rebellious sons, these stories invoke other passionate conflicts—between men and women, union members and those who "cross the line," Roman Catholic and Protestant, the older and younger generations, and even between poets and more prosaic folk ("They say the standing army of poets never falls below ten thousand in this unfortunate country"). Only two of the stories strike false notes. In one, "High Ground," a young man who is urged to supplant the benign, hard-drinking principal of his school days—a particularly awful act of betrayal—overhears the old man, at the end of the story, praising his former students. Given the usual credibility of Mr. McGahern's plots, this neat juxtaposition seems contrived. The other unconvincing narrative, "Bank Holiday," treats an idealized affair between a middle-aged Dubliner and a young visitor from America. Unlike the author's plausible depictions of love gone awry, this is not a compelling picture of contemporary life, in Dublin or anywhere else; Mr. McGahern is more persuasive in evoking the moon's dark side than in describing moonlight and roses.

If two stories fail to convince, however, the other eight not only succeed, but even invite second and third close readings. It strikes me, in fact, that with this book, his seventh, Mr. McGahern joins a charmed circle of contemporary Irish writers that includes Edna O'Brien, Seamus Heaney and Thomas Kinsella, not bad company by any standard. His work surely merits a wider audience than it has so far enjoyed.