The “Rich Whole”: John McGahern’s Collected Stories as Autobiography

“Wheels,” the opening story of the Collected Stories, provides a key to the paradoxical accomplishment of McGahern’s fiction—its achieved sensual texture and the skeptical reasoning that appears to abort human wishes. The “rich whole that never came” is symbolized by the wheel and its analogues, a vision rooted in memory which confounds the passage of time. McGahern’s thinking about art is Proustian, as “The Image” reveals, and the Collected Stories may be read as a large-scale autobiographical project focused on memory, time, and the changing status of the narrative voice in relation to certain recurring images. The images, which highlight the revisionary nature of McGahern’s progress through three volumes and on to “The Country Funeral,” are typically drawn from rural and familial scenes and situations. They are the anchor of McGahern’s imagination in his first world of childhood experience.