A Writer in Full Control
DUGAN, LAWRENCE
A Writer in Full Control Collected Stories By William Trevor Viking. 1,261 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Lawrence Dugan Free-lance critic; contributor, Philadelphia "Inquirer" When characters...
...Interspersed among these are omnisciently written passages about the effect her presence in the large household has on the butler...
...In the Middle Ages, in fact, authors were often called "makers...
...His Irish are a step above most of their countrymen financially...
...If one had to draw a moral from his stories, it would be that sexual indiscretion, even the mere imagining of it, leads to unhappiness...
...Yet that is indeed what a writer should be doing...
...Trevor's stories are written in a classical, economical manner...
...By the end of the story it has come to seem like another planet, yet one where the characters still give instructions to baby sitters and listen to Simon and Garfunkel...
...Whether or not the plight of these figures moves us, their creator's technical facility can only impress...
...The world here is contracted, reduced to an intense isolated landscape illuminated for a moment by Trevor's accomplished technique...
...At 35 pages, the story may be longish, but it is nevertheless a tour de force—Trevor at his best...
...contributor, Philadelphia "Inquirer" When characters in a story or novel are manipulated with evident skill, readers may get a slightly uneasy feeling that the author is exercising a godlike command...
...In "Downstairs at Fitzgerald's"?-a complicated tale in which Trevor shifts the scene from school to pub to racetrack in a few pages with great deftness—a girl comes to realize her father's profound loneliness when she learns why his wife divorced him...
...The subject of "An Evening with John Joe Dempsey" is a boy who listens to wild tales a dwarf invents about the sex lives of their neighbors...
...The Property of Colette Nervi" tells of a pretty but lame girl who, out of desperation, marries a man 20 years her senior...
...her addiction to dime Westerns has all but destroyed her sense of reality...
...They are a little smarter, too, and a little more observant...
...Trevor's Ireland (and sometimes England) is a cold, dreary place where refuge is sought in fantasy—usually sexual...
...This collection abundantly demonstrates that the short-story genre is not simply a subdomain of realistic fiction...
...But in the end they wind up losers...
...In "Miss Smith," an early work, we enter two lives in medias res, those of a school teacher in a small Irish town and a young boy she bullies...
...Their past is implied rather than related directly, and in only a few pages the author leads us to a brutal and unexpected, albeit believable, conclusion...
...Lunch in Winter" depicts an aging actress caught up by her philandering and lies...
...Their unnamed milieu is referred to only by the city-planner's term "outer suburb," which lends it an alien, sinister air...
...his events and characters are pared down to the essentials...
...A case in point is "Angels at the Ritz," the title piece of an early collection...
...Here Trevor shows the degeneration of two previously romantic couples into suburban adulterers who regard their organized wife-swapping as a legitimate alternative lifestyle...
...Trevor's lives are a lot like those in Brian Moore novels...
...In a series of journal entries, a young British governess records her impressions upon first coming to Ireland during the Great Potato Famine in the mid 1840s...
...Take "The News from Ireland," where elements of historical fiction and the diary-novel are adroitly incorporated into the narrative...
...In the case of William Trevor, the appellation is especially fitting...
...But when it comes to sex, Trevor is a remarkably conservative writer...
Vol. 75 • November 1992 • No. 14
