Amongst Women

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A lyric lament for Ireland, McGahern's lovingly observed family drama is dominated by an almost pathetic paterfamilias. Gruff, blustering Michael Moran, former guerrilla hero in the Irish War of Independence, is a man ``in permanent opposition.'' Now a farmer, he vents his compulsion to dominate, his cold fury and sense of betrayal on his three teenage daughters. Yearning for approval but fearing his flare-ups, they periodically beat a path back to the farmhouse from London and Dublin, then take flight again, both proud and dependent. Moran's second wife, Rose, much younger than he, displays saintly patience in her attempts to heal this splintering family. Moran also claims a renegade son in London who is ``turning himself into a sort of Englishman,'' and another son driven away by Moran's threats of beatings. McGahern ( The Dark ; The Pornographer ) has crafted a wise and tender novel whose brooding hero seems emblematic of an Ireland that drives away its sons and daughters. (Sept.)

Library Journal

One joke about the Irish War of independence is that several weeks' negotiations only reached the Middle Ages. McGahern's character Moran is an aging veteran of that war whose brooding on the past obscures his present. The novel is in form and style much like McGahern's first, The Barracks (1963). A male protagonist whose extreme state of mind could be called patrimania abuses the women who sustain him and refuses to acknowledge the obsolescence of his mind, body, and convictions. Such is Moran's obstinacy that he manages to traumatize his family by the mulish application of the ``family-that-prays-together-stays-together'' theory. McGahern's work vindicates obsession with the past and reexamination of fictional landscape by extracting new power from familiar predicaments. A most satisfying addition to a very distinguished body of work.-- John P. Harrington, Cooper Union, New York