Sean O'Faolain called the art of which he is such a brilliant exponent "an immense confidence-trick, an immense illusion, as immense a technical achievement as the performance of an adept magician." O'Faolain wasn't actually attacking the short story, but he was insisting that its characterisation is always simple and undeveloped, and that we mustn't look for the depths and mysteries of personality in a literary form which can only make people "appear to appear." (p. 64)

Whether the way in which literary opinion turned unconsciously against the short story was due to this sense of its being essentially a cheat, it's difficult to say, but what is certainly true is that this most difficult art has recently begun to emerge from a long winter of neglect…. That sweet, subtle, teasing art has returned from its exile in triumph—and it has returned to remind us that silence, exile and loneliness were often (though not always) what it was about, and that we should no longer view those qualities as being necessarily reductive and limiting. (pp. 64-5)

The socially marginal is the setting of "Admiring the Scenery" where three teachers stand on a little railway platform in the middle of a vast stretch of bogland. (p. 65)

Concealed behind the story's ostensible subject—three men sharing an anecdote about an eccentric character—there is another level of experience, and it is in the recognition of this hidden subject that we receive that formal pleasure which is one of the essential qualities of every good short story. It's as though the story casts a shadow which is the untold story of Hanagan's miserable love-affair. And it would be quite unfair to say that O'Faolain is a conjurer making flatness seem three-dimensional, because what we admire here is both his technical skill and the feeling of depth which he creates. His ending is not an empty trick.

In this element of formal pleasure, which is one of the results of its disciplined tightness, the short story resembles the sonnet, and like the sonnet many short stories playfully invite the reader to notice and share their technical self-consciousness…. One of the many joys of O'Faolain's work lies in noticing the play of hidden allusion and commentary in it. In "I Remember! I Remember!" he aims a clever joke at naturalism as well as giving an example of a typically Irish mnemonic tyranny. In "Of Sanctity and Whiskey" he pays oblique tributes to Browning and James in this tale of a proud and cunning cleric sitting for an alcoholic portrait-painter, and in "The Faithless Wife" and the variously clever "How to Write a Short Story" he knocks his detested Maupassant, while in "Something, Everything, Anything, Nothing" he returns to James and Browning. It is like glimpsing a series of sophisticated conversations in a literary heaven of witty spirits.

O'Faolain is a great story-teller, who can be wry, dreamily otherworldly, sensuous, ascetic, sad and funny. (p. 66)