William Trevor: Selected Stories

This book, Selected Stories, is, as the title suggests, a selection of William Trevor's stories. There are 48 stories here, which is an indication of the man's prolificacy. Most of the stories are about ten pages long, with one major exception I'll get to. They are prosaically titled: some titles include: "A Day," "Three People," "The Children," "The Room," "A Friendship." Almost all of them are set in Ireland (Trevor's birthplace) and England (his current residence), although a few are set in France. America is seen, as it long has in the Irish imagination, as over the rainbow.

Trevor's stories are so intricate and carefully written that one pictures him using a jeweler's loupe as he writes. Almost every one of the stories--in fact, perhaps all of them--deal with some sort of loneliness. Whether it's widowhood, children who are separated by divorce, affairs, or strangers bumping into each other, the sense of sorrow and despair. There are numerous priests involved, and Protestants living in a Catholic country .There aren't a lot of happy people in these stories.

Occasionally I would read one of the stories and realize I didn't know what was going on, and would only pick up the thread half-way through. "Death of a Professor," about a professor who has his obituary erroneously printed in a newspaper, is one of the few stories with a droll sense of comedy, but I didn't figure it out until partially through it. I think many of his stories require a second read-through. Other stories hit the ground running. The best opening is from "A Friend in the Trade," about a business associate who has attached himself to a family: "They fell in love when A Whiter Shade of Pale played all summer. They married when Tony Orlando sang Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree. These times are faded memories now, hardly there at all, and they've forgotten Procol Harum and Suzi Quatro and Brotherhood of Man, having long ago turned to Brahms."

After finishing the book I flipped through it and jotted down 17 stories that I liked, not a bad batting average. I especially enjoyed "Child's Play," about two children who are forced together by marriage and form a fast friendship; "A Bit of Business," when a gang of burglars break into a house and tie up the elderly house sitter while he's watching the visit to Dublin by the Pope; "Three People," where a handyman invents an alibi to rescue a woman from a murder charge; "Good News," about a young girl who gets an acting job, but may have endured something very terrible on the set. Many of the stories have no resolution, not like we're used to. A terrific one called "Gilbert's Mother" details a woman who suspects her son of killing someone, but we never know if he did or not.

Others include "The Mourning," in which a young man is recruited into a bombing by the IRA; "Le Visiteur," a tale of a one-night stand among two people in France; "The Telephone Game," where a party takes a bad turn after a malicious prank; "An Evening Out," which may detail one of the worst blind dates in literature; "Big Bucks," which specifically deals with Irish emigration to America, and how it affects a relationship; and "The Dressmaker's Child," a wonderful tale about an auto mechanic who takes a Spanish couple to visit a statue of the Madonna, and on the way back may or may not have run over a young girl.

The masterpiece of this collection is the longest, called "Lost Ground." It is about a teenage boy, the presumed heir of his father's farm and a Protestant, who one day sees an apparition of a woman who calls herself St. Rosa. He tells his brother-in-law, a minister, who urges him to keep it a secret, but the boy feels the need to preach, and his family ends up locking him up. His older brother, a member of a Protestant militant group, takes an even harsher view. It's a thrillingly vibrant story about life for Protestants in Northern Ireland, as well as as a brilliant look at faith, religious passion, and madness.

The other thing that came from reading this book is that it revived my interest in visiting Ireland. One day, one day!