Word: faolains
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...Vanishing Hero is a promising-looking book. Subtitled "Studies in the Novelists of the Twenties," it is a series of short, incisive chapters on eight English and American writers who generally make fine grist for critical mills. Sean O'Faolain, the author, is a man who has demonstrated a conspicuous and sensitive intelligence in a wide variety of fields...
However, his book of criticism is distinctly unsatisfying, and O'Faolain himself has inadvertantly supplied the reason. In writing about Joyce, he asserts that "all criticism is a form of autobiography." This is a dubious statement, but The Vanishing Hero bears it out. O'Faolain is an Irish man of letters who cares very much about Ireland; for all his intellect, he is something of a provincial. This provinciality, and the parallel concerns for country, are assets in his short stories, but they make him an extremely limited critic. The more remote his subject is from Ireland, the worse...
...Faolain's provinciality has given his book a central defect and a number of gaping holes. The central defect is over-simplification. After due deliberation, he concludes that Huxley's books are too full of intellectual fireworks to make coherent points, that Greene gives an unrealistic prominence to suffering, that Hemingway is not so hard-bitten as he seems at first. These conclusions are all very sound, but none of them come as revelations...
Furthermore, he has occasional and annoying lapses of complete blindness, especially about Hemingway. He complains that Hemingway's heroes have no pasts, no sense of tradition; quite so, but this rootlessness is their most characteristically American aspect, and helps account for their credibility. O'Faolain does not seem to understand that everyone does not have an Irish sense of ancestry and history...
...this description of these short stories a reviewer can only add that O'Faolain underestimates the results of his own work. He has not satirized Ireland; he has defined it so clearly that you may begin to believe that this is Ireland talking, not the author...