Like William Trevor still does, John McGahern wrote largely about the Irish people. Usually normal people, often in normal situations, and he makes it compelling. In the stories in High Ground McGahern writes of changing Ireland in the 1980s. A burgeoning Ireland where unmarried people live together and unwed mothers no longer necessarily flee to England to have their babies. Where adults, often with successful careers, feel adrift from the disappearing life they knew in rural Ireland, a life that persevered for generations prior to the economic boom.

Many of the stories involve moral choices. In Like All Other Men, a teacher who has recently left the seminary meets a nurse at a dance who is about to enter a religious order. They spend the night together in Dublin and both realize something that might have been is lost forever as they part. In the title story a young teacher is offered a back-door way to get the headmaster job of his former teacher, a man he once revered, and who is now apparently unfit due to alcohol.

There are familiar McGahern themes and characters. A father filled with hatred for his son, and perhaps everything, in Gold Watch. A priest who “in private believed that the affairs of the earth ran more happily the less God was brought into them all together.”

All is not modern in McGahern’s Ireland. A woman being courted finds that “furtiveness was what she found in most Irish men when faced with a young woman.” ( )

Those who have called John McGahern a modern Chekhov are struck by his ability to transform commonplace experiences into moments of epiphany. In “Parachutes,” the narrator reels in the aftermath of a breakup with the woman he loves; “Oldfashioned” isthe story of Johnny, a country boy oddly drawn to the elderly English couple for whom he represents the son they lost in the War; and in “Eddie Mac” and “The Conversion of William Kirkwood,” a wealthy family and its hired help learn that the relationship of master and servant is the most enduring relationship of all.

In High Ground, John McGahern displays all of his acclaimed mastery, and both deepens and extends the world of his generous imagination. ( )