[Humphreys is an American novelist and essayist. In the following positive assessment of The Collected Stories, she provides an overview of McGahern's plots and characters.]

One way to approach a story is to think of it as the writer's response to the most important question he can ask. The response is often complex, ambiguous and changeable, but the question is simple and almost always the same. The bigger the question, the riskier the fiction. In the story "Bank Holiday" in John McGahern's Collected Stories, a 50-year-old man tells the woman he loves, "I find myself falling increasingly into an unattractive puzzlement, mulling over that old, useless chestnut, What is life?"

That's Mr. McGahern's chestnut—the biggest. Old indeed, but useless only to those who are stupid or happy or both. Asking about it is hazardous. Later in "Bank Holiday," the woman calls to her lover from the bedroom, teasing. "I hope you're not puzzling over something like 'life' again," she says. But Mr. McGahern, one of Ireland's most distinguished writers, has been doing just that through five novels (from The Barracks in 1964 to Amongst Women in 1990) and these 34 stories (some of which have appeared in his three previous collections). The life he puzzles over is Irish, rural, hard. Despair drains away the usual human consolations; family and church and romantic love are all infected in some way, and "What is life?" is a very difficult question indeed.

Mr. McGahern's response to it is usually made through pure narrative—that is, through event and dialogue alone, without interpretation. His characters may struggle to discover meaning in their circumstances, but the reader's sense, increasing with each story, is that logical answers are going to be elusive, solutions impossible. Mr. McGahern is drawn again and again to certain specific scenes, and doesn't hesitate to rework the basic situation of an earlier story in order to circle back around it, to get at it again. More than one story involves a stepmother named Rose, who deflects as best she can the brutal cruelty of her husband; but she is not always exactly the same Rose, and the father is sometimes a policeman and sometimes not. More than once a young man falls in love, and the love goes bad; or he escapes from the church; or he goes home to visit, for the last time, his aging father. The similar stories don't indicate continuity or sequence; instead, they're retakes, as if the author were a film director and had decided to shift the details and reshoot from a different angle—this time with the young man as a lawyer or a teacher, and next maybe with the young woman on the rebound or about to become a nun or pregnant.

In the story called "Oldfashioned," the young man is a director, and his films are about "the darker aspects of Irish life." Critics find them "more revealing of private obsessions than any truths about life or Irish life in general." A critic who would say the same of Mr. McGahern's work would have failed to understand the wellspring of fiction. Private obsessions can be the surest path toward the truth of life in general. It appears that Mr. McGahern's obsessions have led, over time, from a vision of despair (life as a "journey to nowhere," as the son in the first story, "Wheels," calls it) to something more mysterious.

People long to escape in the early stories, maybe to Dublin or London or America, where they think there might be something more to life than "scratching our arses, refining our ignorance." Some allow themselves to hope only for a less literal escape. In "Strandhill, the Sea," a boy can no longer bear the killing tedium of a small coastal town: "The need to escape to some other world grew fiercer, but there was no money." The only place he can go is into fiction, the stolen comic books to which he turns for his heroes and gods. Love, in stories like "My Love, My Umbrella" and "Doorways," can sometimes look like the great escape, a "dream of paradise," says the narrator in "Parachutes"; but paradise is actually on the verge of collapse just at the moment when it seems most attainable. Marriage, as in "Peaches," can be a nightmare.

In some of the stories, a source of compensation is offered (but usually goes unnoticed); it is "the solid world," often delivered in a few simple words, as in "The Wine Breath": "There was the lake, the road, the evening." The apprehended physical world, Ireland itself, in sky and sound, plants, creatures—specific, colored and textured—is a hope. Not because it is beautiful, but because it exists and can be seen and can be recalled.

Mr. McGahern, a master of the clean, plain, powerful description, is able to convey the strange phenomenon of immanence, the presence in material things of nonmaterial significance. "I saw the white tinsel of the sea thistle," the young man of "Doorways" says, "the old church, the slopes of Knocknarea, the endless pounding of the ocean mingled with bird and distant child cries, the sun hot on the old stones, the very day in its suspension, and thought if there was not this tension between us, if only we could touch or kiss we could have all this and more, the whole day and sea and sky and far beyond."

That vision, of love not as end but as means of gaining the world, is made more explicit in "Along the Edges," a two-part story about the kind of love that fails and the kind that works: "They would have to know that they could know nothing to go through the low door of love, the door that was the same doorway between the self and the other everywhere."

"The Country Funeral," the final entry in the collection, represents as full a recovery from despair as one would want from the writer of these brilliant stories—that is, a recovery that's tentative and still grounded in puzzlement rather than a conversion to happiness. Three grown brothers, disaffected in various ways, attend the funeral of an uncle they never loved. By processes that none of them can explain—simply by gathering with the dead man's friends, hearing and telling stories, witnessing the funeral ritual, watching a rabbit hop out of the briers on a hill, drinking themselves into a stupor—they are reconciled not only with one another but also with their history and their land. (And the place to which desperation once drove Ireland's youth is mentioned only in a joke about some good-for-nothing neighbors: "The Whelans were never liked. They are all in America now.")

When one of the brothers says, "Gloria is far from over," he means the small, isolated town of Gloria Bog, where the uncle has been buried. But there is another gloria, a radiance to be discovered beyond the self; and he may mean that, too.