From Ireland, subtle tales of solitude, quiet beauty

A BIT ON THE SIDE

By William Trevor

Viking, $24.95, 245 pages

REVIEWED BY DEBRA BRUNO

Although William Trevor is one of the greats, he doesn’t always get the fanfare he deserves,

not in this country at least. Perhaps that’s because he’s such a quiet writer, taken up with subtle things. He concerns himself with the flow of language in a sentence and on the page, as rhythmic and continual as waves lapping the shore.

Mr. Trevor has won a host of English and Irish awards, from the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1994 for “Felicia’s Journey” to the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Fiction in 2001 (“The Hill Bachelors”). Yet this fact seems secondary; to Mr. Trevor, it seems to matter more that he can get right the sound of Irish voices, the musty smell of old houses, the sense of loss, of joy, of the quiet desperation that is the lot of so many of us.

His latest work, “A Bit on the Side,” is a collection of 12 short stories. More than half of the stories originally appeared in the New Yorker. The book is supposedly concerned with the theme of adultery; and although infidelity is a presence in a number of the stories, to say that Mr. Trevor’s new book is about cheating is like saying that “The Great Gatsby” is about rich people. Well, yes, but it’s also about much more.

For instance, Mr. Trevor captures, better than almost any writer I’ve seen, the sense of loss in today’s Catholic Church. And unlike the many writers who throw words and images at the reader until the larger impression gradually forms, he is selective and careful in his craft.

Here, for instance, in just three sentences in the story “Justina’s Priest,” he sums up the church today. The story is brilliantly written from the perspective of a despondent priest: “The grandeur of his Church had gone, leaving his priesthood within it bleak, the vocation that had beckoned him less insistent than it had been. He had seen his congregations fall off and struggled against the feeling that he’d been deserted. Confusion spread from the mores of his times into the Church itself; in combating it, he prayed for guidance but was not heard.”

What’s beautiful here is not just the juxtaposition of today’s world with an ancient institution that struggles to survive in it, but also the priest’s personal helplessness and sense of abandonment from the church and from God.

The Catholic Church hovers in the background of many of the stories, never central but never far away. Like a ghost felt rather than seen directly, it is a steady presence in the lives of the Irish, its rules and conformities often posing limits on lives already edged with boundaries.

As powerful as his treatment of the church is Mr. Trevor’s ear for the Irish voice. It’s the pared-down voice of simple men and women living simple lives. You can hear these voices and know, without understanding anything else about the setting, that these are the Irish.

“‘It’s cold,’ she said, ‘I’ll light the fire.’ ‘Ah no. Ah, no, don’t bother.’” In that plain-spoken exchange you can hear the middle-aged women trying to be polite as they sit with another woman, a stranger to them, whose husband has just died.

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