Yes, it is true that nothing happens in this novel. It is also true that the style is beyond plain: featureless, nondescript, more of an absence than a presence.And yet. The novel shines with its own muted but steady luminosity. The characters linger, take up permanent place in the reader’s mind, settle in as easily and unselfconsciously as the neighbor, Jamesey, who is so confident of his welcome in his friends’ house that he comes in without knocking and helps himself to refreshment at any time. Jamesey, married and the father of successful children, is the foil to Bill, a formerly abused child whose damage is obvious. Bill, a bachelor loner and local eccentric, also shows up without an invitation, but unlike Jamesey has no apparent interest in the Ruttledges (the central protagonists) beyond demanding cigarettes and whiskey — which they provide without a fuss, because they know who and where they are, and rather like it.Where they are is rural Ireland sometime in the last forty years, judging by the (minimal) technology in evidence. In this account, not much has changed since the eighteenth century, and although Ireland has thrown off the English yoke, society in the Ruttledges’ town is in no great rush to catch up with the rest of the world. The Ruttledges and their neighbors are farmers, largely unmechanized, and their world will rise and fall on getting in the hay before it rains. Automobiles are scarce; bicycles, trains, and shank’s pony still rule. Is this charming? Is this quaint? Not in the usually cuddly-cozy way familiar to fans of period dramas. Life here is difficult, and while the landscape may be beautiful, it is a quiet beauty that does not call attention to itself.That is one of the virtues of this novel right there: the town, the people, the way of life, are a million miles removed from both the self-obsessed yakety-yak that fills the pages of much modern writing, and the breathless plot-driven action of popular bestsellers. By the Lake is sui generis and that rare treat, a slow read.Into this placid, pleasing world, the character John Quinn drops like a firework. Quinn is deeply flawed, and unredeemable. A pathological liar, he is abusive and fawning, vicious and saccharine, by turns. With childish simplicity and faux naivete, he self-presents as someone he is not (rich and young, mostly). His bombast and pretense would be laughable, if the facade were not as thin and transparent as it actually is. The Ruttledges and their neighbors, however, do not laugh in Quinn’s face, do not excoriate his many sins, do not, as we say today, judge him. Quinn is accepted like the rain and the seasons. This is grace.After I read By the Lake, I read McGahern’s memoir All Will Be Well. Poor author: it appears that John Quinn, or someone very like him, was his father. Surviving such an upbringing would be praiseworthy enough; that McGahern became a serious writer is not far short of miraculous.If you find page-turners boring, if you dislike suspense and high stakes, if gratuitous sex and brand names ringing like false coins do not loom large in your favorite books, you will be delighted, as I was, with By The Lake. Everything is not something. Sometimes what we think is nothing turns out to be all we want and need.