Publishers appear to assume that once autumn arrives, people cast aside their Dan Browns and J.K.Rowlings, and endeavour to tackle some serious literature. Ireland’s leading novelist, John McGahern has written “Memoir“, a non-fiction account due out in September of his childhood spent in the fairly grim milieu of the Irish border county, Leitrim, during the 1940s and 50s. (To be honest, even in the supposedly upbeat 00s, Leitrim can offer a fairly melancholy aspect some days.) At the risk of committing literary blasphemy, on the basis of the three novels by McGahern I’ve read, I’ve found it difficult, despite the high standard of the writing, to relate to their themes. Maybe it’s because I’m a deracinated product of a contemporary Ireland that has ditched its heritage. Yet on the other hand, when certain themes become so familiar–the church-dominated small town, the emotionally distant father, the parched sexuality of Ireland in the 1950s–it becomes increasingly difficult to accord them the seriousness they deserve. I’m reminded of the Monty Python sketch that parodies DH Lawrence–the son of a working-class London playwright rebels against his father by going up to Yorkshire to become a miner. There is nothing more fatal to a writer’s credibility than parody–I don’t think DH Lawrence’s reputation, nor, for that matter, Ernest Hemingway’s, has yet to fully recovered from accurate parodies.And the tropes of what still remains Ireland’s best writing is acutely vulnerable to these subversions. The otherwise excellent television adaptation of McGahern’s “Amongst Women,” by hewing to a miserabilist atmosphere, inadvertently lurched into self-parody on occasion. And I couldn’t help wondering what a comic team blessed with malevolent talent would make of the latest DruidSynge cycle, which was extensively discussed in last weekend’s New York Times (in an article suggestively entitled “Nasty, Brutish, and Long“). Perhaps the plays’ subject matter can still be revelatory to those outside Ireland, but many of the play’s motifs (the coffin in the corner of the room, the minatory sounds of the pounding surf, and the inevitability of maternal keening for the dead fishermen) seem to (some of) us who were obliged to study and attend such works during school and beyond more like cultural checkboxes to be ticked–presented in a formal kind of Hiberno Kabuki that keeps on being staged, impervious to the audience’s interest, or lack of it.