All Will Be Well

Verlyn Klinkenborg

The course of All Will Be Well takes us through the writer's life, almost down to the present. And yet what makes this memoir so moving is its insistence — shared with many of McGahern's stories and novels — on the power of the single day that passes before us. For McGahern, daily routine is the root of our being, the arena of our noticing. It has an ontological glow, as if life were best understood in the episodic rhythms of daylight and darkness.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Now in his early 70s, award-winning novelist McGahern grew up in rural Ireland, the oldest of seven children in a dysfunctional, devoutly religious family. He adored his schoolteacher mother, who died of breast cancer when he was nine, and he writes of her with awe and tenderness. The young McGahern set his sights on the priesthood, a dream tied up with his love of his mother: "We'll live together in an old presbytery close to the church, and when you die I'll say so many Masses for you that you'll hardly have to spend any time in purgatory." She was the opposite of his coldly calculating father, Frank, who was suspicious, secretive, miserly and fueled by a need to dominate everyone in his life. The kind of husband who prayed for his dying wife, but didn't sit by her bedside, and the kind of father who didn't attend his children's weddings, Frank was the obvious inspiration for the patriarch of McGahern's most famous work, Amongst Women. The writing is lyrically beautiful and rich in details of Ireland of the '40s and '50s. Yet the memoir is also hard to penetrate because of its digressions and the unfortunate editorial choice to run the text together without chapter breaks. (Feb. 13) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

McGahern recalls a tough childhood in "the hidden Ireland," his mother's death when he was but a child, and his career as one of Ireland's most distinguished novelists. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A gloomy memoir of growing up amid harsh conditions in rural Ireland. Born in 1934, novelist McGahern (By the Lake, 2002, etc.) traces his childhood in and around Leitrim, a central lake town at the base of the Iron Mountains where the soil is extremely poor and life rather grim and joyless. Early on, he and his three sisters (more siblings arrived later) lived with their paternal grandmother and mother in Ballinamore, while their father, a former IRA member now serving as a sergeant in the army, was stationed at the barracks 20 miles away in Cootehall. Young Sean, as the boy was known, clung to his gentle mother, Sue, a schoolteacher. Although she never beat her children, she couldn't protect them from the occasional explosive brutality of their willful, handsome father or the routine canings received at the hands of schoolmistresses. At the base of the violence tolerated by this deeply Catholic society, asserts McGahern, "was sexual sickness and frustration": Sex was deemed unclean, and the division between body and soul firmly demarcated. After their mother died of cancer, ten-year-old Sean and his siblings lived at the whim of their coldly calculating father. The children drew together for survival, scrambling to educate themselves and then get away from home. Sean was accepted at a teachers' training college in Dublin closely associated with the Church, which assured him of a good job at a time when many Irish people were forced to find employment in Britain or abroad. His father gradually declined in mental and physical health just as Sean's literary star was rising; his first novel, The Barracks, won the AE Memorial Award in 1963. After he married, the author moved back to Leitrim,mostly as a gesture toward the memory of his beloved mother. Occasionally meandering, but possessing a quiet authority and subtle emotional power.