The 34 short stories in this collection cover a wide swath of John McGahern’s career. And although he is perhaps best known for his novels, he remains one of the preeminent proponents of the Irish short story form in the latter part of the 20th century. Many of the stories here concern small acts of love, lust, shame, or regret that afflict middling people— civil servants, teachers, farmers, etc. Some are so dark as to be nearly scandalous, while others are as light as an Irish breeze. Often characters are transitioning from the country to the city, or from single life to married life, or between life and death. Central male characters have a tendency to be sentimental but ineffectual, whereas the central female characters tend to be unsentimental and driven by the necessities of life. Some stories are more like impressionistic sketches. And, given the number, there is a degree of retreading the same ground. That, and a bit of sameness to the voices.

The stories work best in short doses of one of two at most in a sitting. You might safely dip in to any story in the collection and not be disappointed.

Gently recommended. ( )

It’s rare that I read every short story in a published collection, usually choosing a story here and there, but I deviated from this habit when I finished John McGahern’s The Collected Stories.

As with most short story collections whereby you can see the author’s writing skill develop, McGahern’s style and vision seem to have been already formed when he started to write. The early stories have the same confidence, humor and grace as the last. One of things I like about his writing is that he avoids any stylistic flashiness in favor of a modest fluid prose, and avoids any pastoral vision casting a sentimental eye over his subjects (it’s more of a dark vision). It’s only when he makes an occasional pitch into philosophizing that his writing becomes shockingly laborious and dull, which in a lesser writer would be no more than a fleeting wrong note sounds like a whole sustained chord gone out of tune. Maybe they’re so startling because, fortunately, they’re so rare.

I’m admittedly a tainted witness when it comes to giving an opinion of McGahern’s work, but some of these stories hold their own with any of the masters of the form.