Everyday People And the Illicit Secrets That Haunt Them Power William Trevor’s Startling “Selected Stories”

“Nothing of love had been destroyed today: they took that with them as they drew apart and walked away from one another, unaware that the future was less bleak than it now seemed, that in it there still would be the delicacy of their reticence, and they themselves as love had made them for a while.”

“Dark nourishes light’s triumphant blaze, but who should want to know?”

“‘You’re looking lovely,’ he said, and she heard but pretended not to so that he’d say it again.”

Few authors in the history of the world have possessed the ability to sketch compelling characters and engrossing plots in the span of 10 pages. The esteemed William Trevor is one of those—as he proved 48 times over in his remarkable “Selected Stories.”

This collection of short stories excel in depicting scenes from everyday life, yet drawing a story out of the minutiae and slowly unveiling the secrets that lie just beyond the monotonous. Dealing in the stark and ordinary, Trevor excels at depicting lives of Thoreau’s “quiet desperation,” unraveling the guilts, grudges, sufferings and mysteries even the most banal of us. He deals in the deviance that lurks just under the surface of seemingly commonplace folks living seemingly nondescript lives.

The stories often end abruptly, with little to no stated resolution, but usually punctuated by a momentous turn of prose. And no topic is out of bounds: faith, pedophilia, random violence, infidelity, murder, unrequired love, religion, deception ... they all fall under Trevor’s sights at one point or another. Many of the stories deal with religion and doubt, often having a parable feel to them. The humor is sparse, but present; irony and symbolism abound. The titles feature no pretense; they are stated matter of factly and without guile.

He casts many of his stories in terms of struggles, whether between tradition and modernity, Catholicism vs. Protestantism or old Ireland vs. the new United Kingdom. He populates his stories with lonely drifters, lost orphans, jaded hustlers and divided spouses, featuring only a single story that shifts to first-person perspective.

Leading off the collection was “The Piano Teacher’s Wives,” a beautiful story of a blind widower who marries in old age the woman he had given up for another before his first marriage. The second wife, Belle, struggles mightily to shrug off the ghost of the first wife, Violet (hard to miss the symbolism in the names of the wives), who painted the entire world for Owen.

“He understood, he did his best to comfort her; his affection was in everything he did. But Violet would have told him which leaves were on the turn. Violet would have reported that the tide was going out or coming in. Too late Belle realized that. Violet had been his blind man’s vision. Violet had left her no room to breathe.”

“After the Rain” offered a melancholy look at past connections and present failings for a woman experiencing another bittersweet end to another love affair, before culminating in a breathtaking final paragraph.

“He backed away, as others have, when she asked too much of love, when she tried to change the circumstances that are the past by imposing a brighter present, and constancy in the future above all else.”

“Gilbert’s Mother” eerily described the horror of a mother fearing—nay knowing—that her son is a murderer. Out of fear, she has put her life on pause, being subordinated to her disturbed son. The intensity and morbidity of the story underscored the fact that the son derived the strength needed to commit his crimes from his mother’s palpable terror.

“Her fear made him a person, enriching him with power.”

Rampant symbolism and serenity enriched “The Potato Dealer,” the tale of a woman holding a bastard at the hands of a priest, and the sad deal struck to protect her—and her family’s reputation. Staying with religion, “Lost Ground” was a stunningly well-written and melancholy tale of a Protestant boy who receives a holy kiss from the ghost of a Catholic saint.

Arguably the highlight of the book, the story includes the supernatural, alcoholism, religious persecution and puberty before ending in a kind of beautiful violence

“The family would not ever talk about the day, but through their pain they would tell themselves that Milton’s death was the way things were, the way things had to be: that was their single consolation. Lost ground had been regained.”

Infidelity and alcoholism permeate the two-ships-passing-in-the-night feel of the somber “A Day,” with the specter of barrenness overhanging a sad but tender end-of-day ritual.

“The morning that has passed seems far away as the afternoon advances, as the afternoon connects with the afternoon of yesterday and of the day before, a repetition that must have a beginning somewhere but now is lost.”

Continuing the string of heavy stories marking the middle of the collection, “The Mourning” details the recruitment and enlistment of an Irish mafia bomber, who eventually can’t ignore a dawning realization.

“Nor that he cried when he walked away, that tears ran down his cheeks and on to his clothes, that he cried for the bomber who might have been himself.”

“Le Visiteur” describes a fateful encounter between two souls from the viewpoint of a young man who misreads the mirroring of his own instant love in a beautiful young woman who seeks only to evoke jealousy. The entire life and future he had envisioned is dashed as he finally understands her intentions, yet we are unable to see the totality of his reaction to this crushing loss of fleeting “love.”

“It could happen like this that you fell in love, that there was some moment you didn’t notice at the time and afterwards couldn’t find when you thought back. It didn’t matter because you knew it was there, because you knew that this had happened.”

“For all this—for what had happened, for what was happening still, she had returned a stranger’s gaze. Destruction was present in the room; Guy was aware of that.”

Trevor employs the first person in the haunting “Solitude,” featuring a girl witnessing her mother’s infidelity, confiding in imaginary friends and eventually taking an unthinkable course of action to quiet the voices.

“I wonder when I gaze for a moment longer if what I see is the illusion imposed by my imagination upon the shadow a child became, if somehow I do not entirely exist.”

“Big Bucks” covers the relationship of a young Irish couple, together since childhood, united in their love of and yearning for America—only to discover just before their wedding that this comprised their only real connection. The foreboding, drifting-apart feel to this tale was inescapably sad.

“They would walk again on the strand, neither of them mentioning the fragility of love, or the disaster that had been averted when they were young.”

Extremely moving was “A Bit on the Side,” a sad, poignant telling of the delicate ending of a love affair. Loss dominated the sublime “Cheating at Canasta,” featuring a widower upholding his dead wife’s wish for him to visit their special restaurant alone. He eavesdrops on a conversation between a quarreling couple and subtly suggests that they treasure each other and the times they have. This pretty, quiet and extremely short tale manages to be charming in a scant amount of words.

“At Olivehill” was the melancholy tale of the death of a patriarch, followed by his sons’ efforts to turn the family farm into a golf course. His widow is tormented by hiding her sons’ plans from him in life, until she is recedes more and more within herself in the dark as progress overtakes her.

A woman suddenly leaves a seemingly happy relationship with an older man in “A Perfect Relationship,” overcoming him with jealousy and confusion. The wistful and sad story ends with her attempted return to him, rebuffed by his acknowledgment that they are in need of different things from their relationship.

“Friendship had drawn them together. Giving and taking, they had discovered one another at a time when they were less than they became.”

“The Children” tells the tale of a widowed man with an 11-year-old daughter whose silent defiance and disapproval of his plans to marry another woman test the bonds of their closeness. “Old Flame” offers a lot to react to, with a wife discovering the extent of her husband’s 40-year affair of sorts with two different women who happen to live together. The depth of intensity and emotion achieved by Trevor here in merely nine pages is purely stunning.

In “Selected Stories,” Trevor has created a fascinating inventory of case studies on the issue of malevolence, and how understated evil can take root in seemingly good people. He uses sparse, but dense and powerful prose to sketch characters that simultaneous detest and empathize with. For me, the seemingly quiet pastoral life will never be looked at quite the same—a tribute to Trevor’s ability to evoke emotion with an understated mastery of sparsely impactful prose.