A Bit on the Side: Stories

Trevor, as usual, writes stories marked first of all by a startling realism of surface. The sights, sounds, smells of the external world are precisely captured and rendered. We see for instance the central female character of "A Bit On The Side" pecking away at a plastic wrapped salad from a nearby Pret a Manger, while her male companion eats a sandwich smelling faintly of marmite with lettuce leaves overhanging its edges. What we know, but the male companion can't, is that the woman continuing to eat her salad actually has no appetite for it. In such a minor detail lies the open sesame to Trevor's art. He takes the reader on a journey into the interior lives of his forlorn characters, showing us that what they reveal to others even in minor matters may be often less than the truth or even the opposite of it. In "Sitting With The Dead," a second example, the central figure Emily tells the visiting Legion of Mary sisters a lot but finally far less about her valuation of her late husband than we the readers are allowed to know. Trevor consistently exposes to his readers, then, that gap which renders people frequently opaque to one another and is in major matters at the core of their ultimate oddity, even mysteriousness. His is artistic fiction of the highest order.

William Trevor is surely one of the most talented current writers of fiction, and a remarkable master of the short story form. And we find him at his best in "A Bit On the Side." His work is subtle, disquieting, unnerving, with a distinct tendency to transmute the fictional world he's constructing, that you thought you understood, into something quite different: and he does it right before your very eyes. Some of these stories are set in the United Kingdom, some in Ireland, as befits the work of an Irishman resident in the U.K.; a man never quite at home anywhere. He gives us a woman waiting at a theater bar for a blind date she's going to regret meeting; a private midlands boys'school where nothing is as it should be; a hotel waiter who takes his job way too seriously. And in his title story,of which we have certain expectations based on the world as we know it: well, he just turns them upside down. His people are sometimes kinder than you might expect, often nastier, but seldom what you thought you were getting.

I have read many great short-story collections, but this one is the best I have read in a very long time. A Bit on the Side showcases several of the darkest, bleakest, most thought provoking and haunting short stories out there. William Trevor has delved into human emotion in a way that most short-story writers aren't able to convey in a few pages. Some of the stories touched me, others disturbed me. And that is what I love about this collection. Trevor made me FEEL for the characters. A book is definitely a keeper when the language is so palpable it almost jumps out of the pages. My favorite stories are "Sitting with the Dead," "Justina's Priest," "Traditions," and "A Bit on the Side." I haven't read Trevor's previous efforts, but I will definitely give them a whirl. I cannot recommend A Bit on the Side: Stories enough.

Finding an author who labors for subtlety, one who more than appreciates it but rather writes for and of the reason of subtlety, for it alone, is awfully, awfully rare. Most authors don't seem to fully understand the magic of quiet intelligence, which allows a reader to slip inside a story and synthesize the events and details. As I have learned in school, it is subtlety that allows a reader to disengage from his or her life and suspend disbelief. I have never read any of William Trevor's work before, but I understand now why he is considered a master storyteller. A BIT ON THE SIDE is a remarkable collection indeed. I recommend Paddock's A SECRET WORD, a brilliant novel-in-stories, for the same reasons.

Irish writer, William Trevor (1928- )(FELICIA'S JOURNEY; THE STORY OF LUCY GAULT), has been called the Chekhov of our time, and if Chekhov were alive today, it is easy to imagine that he would be writing short stories much like the twelve pieces contained here. I always open a new William Trevor book with a sense of excitement. Trevor's writing is brilliant and requires the reader's full attention; it is characterized by subtle nuances that offer keen insights into the heart of human nature. His characters are ordinary people whose personal struggles are depicted with a significance that is both poignant and universal. Reading Trevor requires patience, but readers can expect to emerge from a Trevor story with a broader understanding of what it means to be human. Trevor's eleventh volume of short stories grapples with the uncomfortable truths of disillusioned relationships. In the first story, "Sitting with the Dead," a new widow laments her loss of a hateful husband to two rural Irish nuns ("professional" sitters for the dying). In "Solitude," an heiress tells the story of her parents' unstable marriage to strangers; "On the Streets" follows a woman being stalked by her lonely ex-husband; in "Rose Wept," an 18-year-old schoolgirl weeps with regret over "other betrayals" after gossiping about the cuckolded man who tutors her; and in the title story, a middle-aged accountant explains his reasons for ending an affair with a woman so that she won't be regarded as his "bit on the side. In this emotionally haunting collection of twelve stories, we witness Trevor at his best. His characters discover through the nostalgia of lost love that, when it comes to relationships, "things happen differently" than expected; "we're never in charge" (p. 151). G. Merritt