A man lit by serene acceptance

All Will Be Well: A Memoir
By John McGahern
Knopf, 289 pp., $25

When everyone is writing memoirs, we should prize especially the writer's memoir (the exemplar is usually Nabokov), or work from someone who, over years, often decades and many books, has learned a craft.

While such a life has not necessarily been more interesting or as urgently attention-getting as those of the onetime drug addict, the recovering alcoholic, or healed victim of home abuse, experience counts only so far as one can render art from it, sentence after sentence, so that from these parts comes -- what seems -- the nearest we can approach to the whole.

Until his death two weeks ago, John McGahern wore, along with William Trevor, the badge of Ireland's greatest writer, except that he had lived nearly all his life in Ireland, miles or less from where he grew up. This made him exceptional among writers -- Joyce, Beckett, O'Casey, and even Trevor -- who have given the culture the image of the Irish artist as necessary exile.

Furthermore ,that place of growing up is not Dublin but the rough hinterland of counties Leitrim and Roscommon, where little happens and life, in riverine villages and market towns with no city to draw people toward, is hard even for mid-century Ireland. But in his memoir, ''All Will Be Well," McGahern suggests the absence of stimulation was a good thing for this particular writer, imbued by his saint-like mother with the notion that ''the best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day."

For McGahern, the peace or quiet was long earned: It turns out, ironically perhaps considering what is said above, that his book is largely a recounting of domestic abuse. But no one would mistake the book as a recovery narrative, or think of its creator as some kind of victim.

For all the hideous treatment endured by McGahern and his six younger siblings (five girls) from their father, the enduring example is their mother's, who died of cancer when John (called Sean throughout) was 9.

From the beginning the note struck is serene acceptance; ''All Will Be Well," as a title (the original British title is simply ''Memoir"), has its ironic connotations, but here, where the words appear, it is in a God-filled letter from his sick mother to her husband, in which all trust is placed in the deity and that is how one gets by.

The boy's love for his mother is sensual and, perhaps even to her, unsettling; he wishes to become a priest and say Mass for her, and makes her promise not to die. Once she is gone the narrative is taken over by his father, whose professional life is summed up with a single crushing phrase, as the ''outwardly honorable and undistinguished career of a garda sergeant."

Handsome, secretive, officious, violent, self-regarding, and self-pitying yet apparently charming when trying to win someone over whom he will soon be handling brutally (his son describes his occasional efforts with him as ''courting") -- there is no end to vivid descriptions of Frank McGahern in this book. The recurring motif is, after Plato, of a man unable finally to emerge into light, unlike every other member of his family. ''My father's world went inwards to darkness and violence, lies and suppression," McGahern writes, then startles us with its contrast: ''In the beginning was my mother."

One doesn't have to have read McGahern's fiction to admire and be moved by this book. One has only to be interested in Ireland, or childhood, or the power of the religious impulse (shared even by the tyrant Frank), or God, who is finally revealed to the author as ''whatever truth or illusion or longing for meaning or comfort that word may represent."

But, considering one reason that we read writers' memoirs -- which is to trace how certain themes and obsessions began -- now is the time to mention McGahern's masterwork, the 1990 novel ''Amongst Women."

A man much like Frank McGahern, a remarried widower and former IRA man with several sprightly adult daughters and two sons wide apart in years, Moran is a domineering figure grown weak with age, and we know he is going to die.

One might slot the story of ''Amongst Women" somewhere in the last 50 pages of ''All Will Be Well," when everyone is grown and in some substantial charge of himself, and ''Daddy" seems his most benign. But Moran, a less brutal figure, is perhaps the man Frank might have been; whatever he has done he has earned his brood's love. When Moran dies, homage is paid, which in the memoir goes only to the author's mother. ''She never really left us," McGahern writes at the end, and mentions again the country lanes he walked with her as a boy and, until his final illness, still walked; if they could do it again, ''we probably would not be able to speak, though I would want to tell her all the local news." Facing ''no shadow," she would receive an orchid picked by him, and all should be well.

Eric Weinberger teaches expository writing at Harvard University.