Trevor and Chekhov: The fiction of circumscribed lives

As expected, as requested, received two great books yesterday for xmas: Ann Beattie's New Yorker Stories and William Trevor's "Selected Stories." Started reading Trevor last night, or re-reading actually, as the selection is really his last four collections brought together, and I think I've read each of the four - in fact have probably read some of the stories multiple times, in the New Yorker, in Best American or O.Henry, and then in a collection. Trevor of course stands up to multiple readings, and his anointment as the best living English-language short-story writer (along with "Alice the Great" Munro) stands, as do the comparisons with Chekhov. Like Chekhov's, Trevor's characters are consigned to circumscribed lives - in small towns, in bad neighborhoods, in distant provinces - and the stories are about how they live and how the compromise. Trevor's stories are probably more deeply rueful than Chekhov's, and he has a bit more of an ironic bite, but they share the sense of lives in futility. First story in the Selected is The Piano Tuner's Wives, and the plural there is very sly and telling - story involves the 2nd wife who has loved him long and from afar - it's her life that's the unrequited one in this story - and she marries him late in life after his first wife dies; her role is guide him, to be his eyes (he's blind, we learn pretty quickly), and by the end we see that she lies to him about what she sees - in order to control, and to make him think that his first wife had deceived him - but in typically Trevor "roundness" of character and event, we also come to understand that he know she's lying and he has resigned himself to accept this - these are the strategies we adopt for living, for getting by.