Denis Donoghue was not the first commentator, nor will he be the last, to notice that ‘That They May Face the Rising Sun is hardly a novel at all.’ ‘There is no story,’ he explains, ‘no plot, but a series of vignettes. […] Nothing happens except talk, bits of news, gossip, reminiscence’. It is the closest that any of McGahern's published fiction comes to fulfilling a fantasy of his literary hero Gustave Flaubert who dreamed of writing such a book:

While Flaubert never quite realized his dream, McGahern comes very close, in this late masterpiece, to writing the ideal book with nothing at its core.

‘The life where nothing happens’, confessed McGahern in a television documentary made late in his life, ‘is to me the most precious life’. For McGahern, a life of ‘no excitements’ was his stated aim and ambition, as it is for the central characters of That They May Face the Rising Sun, Joe and Kate Ruttledge. Seeking a peaceful, bucolic life, they have both left successful careers in London, returning to the somnolent part of rural Ireland from which Joe Ruttledge originates to exist as quietly and as slowly as the passing seasons. For Samuel Beckett's Estragon in Waiting for Godot, a life where ‘nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes’ is ‘awful’, but for Joe Ruttledge, such an existence is like a version of paradise.