![]() In the twelve stories that make up his latest collection (Viking/Penguin, 2007 hardcover/2008 paperback), Trevor returns to familiar, bleak territory. ![]() He is, as William Boyd magnificently observed in his New York Times review of Cheating At Canasta, “positively anti-Chekhovian,” everywhere breaking our inherited rules, explaining, leaving nothing unsaid, showing and telling to make his points doubly clear. But Trevor does not just bear silent witness: unlike most contemporary short-story writers, he spells out his stories’ moral lessons, traces them to their furthest conclusions, ties up loose ends. ![]() It’s true there is nothing he can do to save his characters from themselves. Even as he reveals lives destroyed or halted by mistakes, one is calmed by his authority, safe in his hands. William Trevor is a God anyone can believe in–ever-loving and omniscient, but not omnipotent. ![]()
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