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Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Does William Trevor's style change over time?

Charles McGrath's review in NYTBR of William Trevor's "Selected Stories" raised the issue/question of whether Trevor's style has evolved or changed at all over the years. I haven't gone back to his early works to give a reasoned answer to that question, but in reading through the Selected Stories (his last 4 volumes of short stories, over about a 20-year span) I see a few evolutionary changes - though it's obvious that Trevor works within a fairly narrow field and that he's not an experimentalist. Still, reading through you'll see that, if his style doesn't evolve, his subject does, in that he's acutely attentive to the social milieu, and we slowly, almost imperceptibly sense that Ireland (setting for most of his stories) is becoming a different country in the 21st century - the abject waste and poverty of the earlier stories is displaced by prosperity, ambition, and internationalism (at least in the cities), adding a new level of tension to the stories: who's staying, who's going, how is the world changing all around us? Another and even more subtle change has to do with Trevor's relation to his characters, and I'm just starting to think about this and watch for it in the stories. The earlier stories, often about a crime or a fateful act and its lifelong repercussions, ended with characters making some kind of accommodation in order to get on with their lives - ended in a darkness and near-despair, the Chekhovian mood that all of Trevor's readers have noted. Gradually, he's moving toward a different point of view: characters commit or witness or live through a dreadful or cruel act and then surprisingly learn from it or recognize something about themselves - as if they've been touched by grace (the analogue here is Joyce's The Dead, I think): an example being the priest who takes confession from a mentally disabled girl, the couple on the arranged date meeting at a theater bar, the boarding school boy who thinks about having sex with the cafeteria worker, the young girl who witnesses her mother's infidelity - all of these characters feel touched by something profound and mysterious, not guilt, remorse, or despair. I will try to get a better handle on this mood as I read the later stories.

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