The New Yorker: Fiction · The New Yorker

Tessa Hadley Reads John McGahern

February 1, 2026·1 hr 23 min·6 clips

The narrator stands in moonlit silence listening to the ticking of a gold watch submerged in a barrel of bluestone spray poison, waiting for 'some word or truth' that never comes.

1. The New Yorker Fiction Podcast features Tessa Hadley reading and discussing 'Gold Watch' by John McGahern, which appeared in the New Yorker in March 1980. 2. Deborah Treisman hosts as fiction editor; Tessa Hadley, British author of 13 books including The Party (2024), After the Funeral, and Bad Dreams, is the guest reader. 3. The episode's central question is how McGahern achieves maximum emotional weight from the smallest gestures — a repeated word, a watch dropped on the floor, a single cruelly calibrated insult. 4. Hadley describes McGahern's prose as having 'a surface lucidity, a surface simplicity' that conceals complex recursive thought, including deliberate repetitions that a New Yorker editor 'might often pencil out.' 5. She identifies the gold watch as the story's organizing object: something you can hold in your hand that, when unpacked, contains 'a universe of patriarchy, of country and city, of men unpicking and remaking power between them in the most deadly, dark way.' 6. The story opens with the narrator encountering a woman from his law school class on Grafton Street on a Saturday morning, 'the week of work over, the weekend still as fresh as the bunch of anemones' in her basket. 7. The woman finds a flat in Hume Street in off the Green in Dublin, and the narrator describes their early weeks together as containing 'extraordinary peace and loveliness' in the high-ceilinged Georgian rooms. 8. A visit to the woman's family in Kilkenny — her father's bakery, aunts and cousins arriving to look the narrator over — goes better than the narrator's own dread; her father is described as 'cautiously kind.' 9. The visit to the narrator's father turns quickly to disaster: the father barely acknowledges their arrival, and at lunch there is silence despite Rose's attempts to keep conversation in the air. 10. Walking the narrator out to the fields on the pretext of asking about walnuts, the father turns at the mock orange bushes and says of the narrator's partner: 'What age is your intended? She looks well on her way to 40.' 11. When the narrator repeats this to her that evening, she goes still and pale, says 'I have to get out of this place,' and insists on leaving first thing in the morning. 12. The gold watch — the narrator's father's Elgin watch, inherited from his own father — falls out of a folded sheet at the farmhouse one evening; the narrator, who has waited his whole life to inherit it, calmly says, 'If the watch isn't going to be fixed, I might as well have it.' 13. The father, caught, deflects by offering to buy the narrator a new watch from an airport duty-free and then walks slowly to his room without giving an answer. 14. The narrator and his partner marry in October in a Franciscan church on the Quays with two vergers as witnesses; she gives him the gold watch on their wedding night, repaired and running. 15. On a return to the farm the following summer — which he expects to be his last at the hay — the narrator brings his father an expensive modern wristwatch from Montreal's duty-free; the father calls it 'ugly' but wears it ostentatiously at breakfast the next morning. 16. That night, outside in the moonlit silence, the narrator finds a thin fishing line hanging from a yew branch into the tar barrel of bluestone poison; the gold watch comes up on the end of the line, ticking — the casing already eaten away. 17. The narrator listens to the ticking in silence, waiting for 'some word or truth,' finds none, then lowers it back carefully into the poison, noting 'time hardly surprisingly was still running. Time that did not have to run to any conclusion.' 18. In the post-reading discussion, Hadley identifies the father's one cruel line — 'she looks well on her way to 40' — as unambiguously hateful: 'She knows it's hatred. There's no living with that kind of hatred.' 19. The episode has a reflective, close-reading tone; Hadley asks specific questions about individual sentences and Treisman draws connections to McGahern's biography and wider body of work. 20. Listeners who enjoy slow, precise literary analysis and are interested in Irish fiction, father-son dynamics, or the craft of understated prose will find the discussion deeply satisfying; those seeking pace or plot summary may not.

As heard by us

A patient reading of Gold Watch, where a father's refusal says almost as much as his acceptance.

Tessa Hadley's return to The New Yorker: Fiction settles on John McGahern's Gold Watch, a story about a grown child coming home with a wariness learned from an ungiving father.

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Why you'd press play

Tessa Hadley reads McGahern on fathers, presents refused, and what gets worn to breakfast anyway.

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