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As a boy, the Irish novelist John McGahern would become so lost in a book he would lose the world around him.
Once he "awoke" from a book, as he puts it, surrounded by his sisters, who had unlaced and removed one of his shoes and placed a straw hat on his head without him noticing.
At its best, All Will Be Well casts that kind of spell on patient readers. It's a gracefully understated memoir of McGahern's painful childhood in the early 1940s in County Leitrim, and it tells a bigger story about mothers and fathers and reading and writing and the importance of place.
The memoir is filled with affection and sadness for his parents, country and church.
McGahern has been described as the greatest living Irish novelist by the British newspaper The Observer. His career is intertwined with Ireland; his second novel, The Dark (1965), about a young boy's dawning sexuality and his conflicting desire to become a priest, was denounced by the Catholic Church and banned by the Irish Censorship Board. His best-known work, Amongst Women (1990), is widely taught in Irish schools.
The title of his memoir comes from a letter his mother wrote before she died of breast cancer. John, the oldest of seven children, was 9.
"A terrible new life was beginning," he recalls, "a life without her, this evening and tomorrow and the next day and the next."
Susan McGahern is portrayed as a big-hearted, free-spirited, intelligent teacher in an era when students were routinely beaten for not paying attention or for getting the answers wrong.
If she had any fault, it was her choice of a husband. Francis McGahern was a handsome former Irish Republican Army fighter turned police sergeant who embargoed his past. Charming but cruel, he was given to fits of rage and violence that he inflicted on his family.
As a young man, he drank to excess. When that put his career at risk, he joined the abstinence movement, the Pioneers, "never a man to do anything by half."
He was manic about control. He called his children "the troops." They called him "The Sergeant." He was an Irish version of Pat Conroy's Colonel in The Great Santini.
In exacting detail, McGahern describes his love for his mother and his fear of his father, without self-pity or bitterness.
Both parents were religious in different ways: "In his shining uniform he always walked with slow steps to the head of the church to kneel in the front seat. She would slip quietly into one of the seats at the back," he wrote.
Together, but as counterbalances, they shaped him. His mother wanted him to become a priest. His father, who as a widower moved the children into the police barracks, urged him to drop out of school.
Instead, McGahern gradually formed a "fantastical idea."
Why, he asked himself, "take on any single life -- a priest, a soldier, teacher, doctor, airman -- if a writer could create all these people more vividly? In that one life of the mind, the writer could live many lives and all of life. I had not even the vaguest idea how books came into being, but the dream took hold, and held."
In spring 1972, I took a course in Irish literature from McGahern, a visiting professor at Colgate University in upstate New York.
At the time, he was barely known outside Ireland.
As I remember it, he taught as he writes: quietly, elegantly, without much of an ego.
One day, a student asked why McGahern hadn't assigned any of his own novels. After a long pause, he said, "I'd be embarrassed."
After all these years, it's good to read the facts of his life, one that he has mined so richly in his fiction.
All Will Be Well
By John McGahern
Knopf, 289 pp., $25
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