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A review by keepingupwiththepenguins
Amongst Women by John McGahern
3.0
My full review of Amongst Women is available on Keeping Up With The Penguins.
I kept waiting for the “clang” that never really came. Amongst Women was, in short, the story of a traumatised veteran abusing and manipulating his whole family until the day he died. All the women he was amongst just made excuses for him and cleaned up after him, keeping the peace instead of calling him out. It’s a heart-breakingly familiar and relatable narrative, but in that sense it’s also really frustrating. Amongst Women is well written but it's not a satisfactory story: it’s a depressing window into a dysfunctional family in a small Irish town.
I kept waiting for the “clang” that never really came. Amongst Women was, in short, the story of a traumatised veteran abusing and manipulating his whole family until the day he died. All the women he was amongst just made excuses for him and cleaned up after him, keeping the peace instead of calling him out. It’s a heart-breakingly familiar and relatable narrative, but in that sense it’s also really frustrating. Amongst Women is well written but it's not a satisfactory story: it’s a depressing window into a dysfunctional family in a small Irish town.