A haunting image of loneliness: William Trevor's stories

Though it's fair to say that every piece in William Trevor's "Selected Stories" is immediately recognizable as Trevor's work, within his well-defined world he does experiment in a few different modes (the short-story form is very useful for writers, allowing them to try different voices and techniques without the huge emotional and intellectual commitment of a novel). As noted in earlier posts, he obviously draws on the influences of Woolf (A Day) and Joyce (Of the Cloth?), and in story I read yesterday he tips his hat to Melville (bit of a surprise, that, as Trevor might put it): A Friend in the Trade, about a married couple who run a small boutique press and a strange friend of theirs, a bookdealer who seems to have no family, no other friends, no ability to communicate except in odd, disjunctive sentences about his findings at various estate sales, a thoroughly lonely character - today we'd probably diagnose him as having Asperger's or autism - who latches onto them and, as they plan to retire and move to a small house in Sussex, threatens to follow them and settle nearby, maybe in outbuildings on their new property. The obvious source is Bartleby, but Trevor brings his own voice and sensibility to this material - you feel bad for the family that is somewhat haunted by this man yet feels a responsibility for him as well, and most of all for the man, his isolation, his dependence, the faint possibility that he may be in love with the wife, his obvious and overwhelming need for a home and hearth. In just a few pages, Trevor creates a haunting image of loneliness.