ABSTRACT
In a review of John McGahern’s Collected Stories, Josephine Humphreys says, ‘One way to approach a story is to think of it as the writer’s response to the most important question he can ask’ (1993:1). Fiction-some fiction at least-is concerned with important truths, and importance is a normative notion. Thus in exploring the sense in which fiction can be true, we may learn something as well about evaluative truths.
