"Last Stories," by William Trevor

What more can I, or anyone, say about the late great author William Trevor’s writing, and especially his short stories? He, along with fellow geniuses Alice Munro and V.S. Pritchett, rule the world of short stories. In my 12/24/10 post on a collection of Trevor’s stories, I described them as “perfect”; I always put him on my various lists of “best” and “favorite” writers. I was sad when Trevor died in 2016, at age 88, but glad that I could always revisit his stories. Now we have a new book, “Last Stories” (Viking, 2018), and as soon as I saw announcements and reviews of the book, I knew I had to read it. The stories are as wonderful as ever. I had already read a few of them that were published in the New Yorker, but was glad to re-read them, as well as to read the ones I had not seen before. Because at this moment I seem to be stuck in the simplistic mode of “His stories are so, so, so good…you should all read them!”, which is a truly inadequate response, I am going to borrow the words of S. Kirk Walsh’s San Francisco Chronicle review (May 27, 2018): “…the author charts the unremarkable lives of men and women who rarely leave their small towns, usually in Ireland and England. As he deftly excavates his characters’ inner worlds, Trevor once again produces a sort of subtle alchemy on the page.” Further, Walsh writes, “Like Alice Munro, Trevor magically compresses these private narratives, advancing through lifetimes in the mere space of 10 or so pages.” Walsh also reminds us that Trevor once, in an interview with the Paris Review, defined the short story as “the art of the glimpse,” and this description resonates with me. As I have written before, the best parts about Trevor’s stories are his portraits of very real characters and his seemingly low-key style, a style that steals into the reader’s mind and heart. In “At the Caffe Daria,” we read about two women who were childhood friends, and what happened when one’s husband left her for the other. Now that he has died, they briefly reconnect, and we learn what happened before and after his death. The story is sad, and delineates the fragile relationships among the three main characters. In “Making Conversation,” a marriage is imperiled when a married man is in a relationship with another woman, and his wife comes to tell his mistress about the marriage. “An Idyll in Winter” is about a broken love story, and what happens when it is revisited. And “The Women” tells of a teenaged girl finding out the unlikely truth of who her mother is; this story is inflected by social class and adolescent self-consciousness, as well as by the heartbreak of the mother who just wants to see a glimpse of her daughter. The other stories in the collection are equally compelling. As I describe the book and its stories, I feel again, as I said at the beginning of this post, that my comments are extremely inadequate to convey the exceptional quality of Trevor’s stories. So maybe I will just repeat what I said above, bluntly but with heartfelt enthusiasm, “His stories are so, so, so good…you should all read them!”