[I]t is that rarest of things in contemporary fiction in English, an achieved and almost perfect work. . . . Rarely nowadays does one come upon a novel that one senses will outlast one’s own time. Amongst Women, despite the quietness of its tone and the limits deliberately imposed upon it by the author, is an example of the novelist’s art at its finest, a work the heart of which beats to the rhythm of the world and of life itself. It will endure.

Readers familiar with John McGahern will recognize the terrain. In his four previous novels and three collections of stories, Mr. McGahern has often evoked the violence, hidden and overt, of family life. His Irish fathers simmer with envy of their own children - of their opportunities, their schooling, their unblemished bodies and minds. . . . Mr. McGahern's prose often fails to achieve the odd mix of the lyrical and the abrupt that has made him, in other books, a writer worth not only reading but listening to. . . . In ''Amongst Women,'' John McGahern walks the line between the beautiful and the archaic, and the result is a kind of double elegy. You feel as if you are saying goodbye not merely to an old man dying, but to a world. It is a world others said goodbye to long ago, and not dissimilarly. Still, reading this determinedly poignant novel, one feels sad all over again.