Virginia Woolf wrote that of all great writers, Jane Austen was “the hardest to catch in the act of greatness.”
William Trevor has that kind of elusive greatness today. His novels and, more commonly, short stories, mostly about Ireland and the Irish, are luminous and moving, but succeed with a minimum of writerly flash.
Trevor establishes character, place and mood with economical strokes. There is often something sad about his stories, some failure of love, some flaw in a marriage, some inevitable decline or loss.
His new book, “Cheating at Canasta,” and its 12 stories would make a fine introduction for a reader new to Trevor.
In the title story, a middle-aged Englishman, Mallory, is dining in Harry’s Bar in Venice, keeping a promise to his wife, Julia, who had been there with him before but is now hospitalized with Alzheimer’s disease. His reflections on his life with Julia are counterpointed by a pointless conversation overheard from another table, and the story ends with this final thought about his wife:
“He watched the couple go, and smiled across the crowded restaurant when they reached the door. Shame isn’t bad, her voice from somewhere else insists. Nor the humility that is its gift.”
The quiet aperçu animates one kind of Trevor story. Another is exemplified in “The Dressmaker’s Child,” where a venal Irish mechanic, in a hurry while exploiting a credulous Spanish couple over a discredited weeping holy statue, apparently runs over a child and, by story’s end, seems fated to marry her weird mother.
Or “An Afternoon,” in which the rather stupid Jasmin is rescued from a pedophile whom she continues to think of as the man she loves: “She touched with her lips the necklace that had been his gift” – won in a vending machine – “She promised she would always keep it by her.”
The most “Irish” of these stories are “Men of Ireland” and “At Olivehill.” The first is a disturbing account of a rogue, returned from England after many years, who preys on a priest with false claims of sexual abuse, sadly plausible these days, though in this instance untrue, and walks away with all the money in the house, while the priest wonders at his own weakness.
“At Olivehill” is a reminder of another kind of failure, in this case the inability of the Catholic families called “the Ascendency” to hold onto their lands and status, as the aging Kitty Broderick draws her curtains, with finality, against the vision of her land becoming a public golf links.
Though his stories are often sad there is nothing depressing about reading them. It is always inspiring to see how art redeems humble material or melancholy detail.
When a writer is nearly 80, like Trevor, a reader is happy to welcome a new work of unimpaired beauty, and “Cheating at Canasta” contains some of the best fiction of his half- century as a writer.
Merritt Moseley teaches literature at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
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FICTION
Cheating at Canasta
by William Trevor, $24.95
