The distinct qualities of the late stories of William Trevor

There's something extremely satisfying in reading through William Trevor's "Selected Stories" and realizing that some of the best stories he's ever written come near the end of the volume, meaning they were written and published when Trevor was about 80 - and he's still going strong. It's true that there aren't major shifts in subject and style as his writing career progresses, but the later stories seem to me to have a greater compression - they tend to be a bit shorter than the stories of 20 years ago, and a higher number of them are about a single, epiphanic event - and they also, paradoxically, tend to have a greater reach: many if not all conclude with a paragraph or two that takes a vast, cool, Godlike perspective on the events of the story and on life. The ur-story for this godlike concluding perspective would be the great Sacred Statues, and Trevor builds on this model consistently. The ur-story for the single moment or even that encapsulates and summarizes a life would probably be Cheating at Canasta, a widowed man visiting the restaurant his wife and he used to enjoy and witnessing a dinner squabble between a young couple, to whom he at last speaks. We feel the intersection of two lives, on mostly lived and the other with the world all before them, and realize with pain and poignancy that they have only this one chance for love and beauty and they are wasting it, as do we all. The latest stories also step a little closer to the lurid and violent: one story about a bully killing a kid accidentally (Bravado) and another (The Dressmaker's Daughter) about a hit and run killing, also a run of several stories about couples engaged in long-term affairs (these set in London). One of the most disturbing of all of his stories is Men of Ireland (on of the few late stories to return to Ireland), in which a man returns to his hometown to accuse a priest of molesting him and to hit him up for money - unjustly, apparently. Every single Trevor story is great or near-great and full of surprise and nuance that other contemporary writers barely approach.