John McGahern and Modernism

John McGahern''s work is not easily conceived of as belatedly modernist. His memorialising, faintly archaic style implies a concern with ''making it old'' rather than new, suggesting the symptomatic diffidence of many who wrote in the wake of modernism. Nevertheless, McGahern''s statements about the ''presence'' of words and the hard-won impersonality of the artwork point to a covert engagement wi...