A love that ennobles but doesn't always unite

A Bit on the Side
By William Trevor
Viking, 245 pp., $24.95

One way or another, all of the stories in William Trevor's wonderful new collection -- his 11th, and his 29th book all told -- are about the power of love. Love, in Trevor's capacious vision of it, takes many shapes. It is indestructible, though not perennial. It does not last, though the transformations wrought by it endure forever. It ravages; it also saves.

Trevor's world is peopled by a Chekhovian array of characters. We meet a priest who finds comfort in his diminished vocation; a boy mysteriously attuned to one of the maids at his prep school; a middle-aged woman only a few hours widowed; a man and woman paired by a dating service; a small-town librarian who refuses the legacy of a woman he once loved; an old woman forever trying to escape the murder she committed as a child; an out-of-work wood carver and his wife; an 18-year-old lapped in the girlish, gossipy warmth of her circle of friends; a fisherman's fiance whose plans to join her young man in America are scuttled, not by him or even by fate, but by "the fragility of love"; a waiter stalking his former wife; a scullery maid in one of the great houses of a bygone century; an adulterous accountant and his "bit on the side."

And we truly do meet these people. Trevor gives them to us from the outside in. So acute is his eye that he can make memorable and distinct four adolescent girls in as many sentences. "Caroline was like that, her matter-of-factness sometimes sounding hard. Angela -- long black hair, brown eyes, rarely smiling because of her dental wires -- was the victim kind, and accident-prone. Liz gave too much, generosity part of her romantic nature. Daisy, red-haired and bespectacled, distrusted the world." Trevor's ear is equally fine: His characters speak with utterly natural yet evocative voices. Exchanges between them give believable, dramatic encounters the power of music.

" 'A thing I'll put to you,' John Michael's uncle was saying now, 'is the consideration of the farm.'

" 'The farm?'

" 'When I'm buried myself.'

" 'What about the farm?'

" 'I'm saying it'll be left.' "

At the same time that he is molding characters so solid we feel we'd recognize them on the street, Trevor also gives them to us from the inside out. We are privy to their most deeply regretted transgressions, their hidden hopes, their fantasies, their fears. Oliver, the schoolboy mysteriously attuned to the maid, Bella, lies awake at night imagining her: "He wondered how, when she was young, her expression had changed when her mood did. . . . He saw her uniform laid out, starched and ready on an ironing board, a finger damped before the iron's heat was tested. He saw her stockinged feet and laughter in her eyes, and then her nakedness."

We meet Trevor's people; but they, for the most part, do not meet each other. These dozen stories share the same structure, their point of view alternating between two characters who cannot connect. Entwined without touching, in a sort of double helix, Trevor's people love -- intensely, generously, recklessly -- but love does not unite them. Oliver's imagining of Bella is as close as they get: They never have an actual encounter. Not even the one happy couple in the book -- the wood carver, Corry, and his wife, Nuala -- are exempt. By the end of the story a fault line has appeared in their union, in the form of a secret that will never be shared.

Nearly all of these stories end with a character alone, looking back, not regretting what might have been, but rather taking comfort in what was. The lovers who planned to marry but instead end up on opposite sides of the Atlantic have, in the woman's vision, not lost but gained by their separation. "The long companionship, their future planned, their passion and their embraces, were marked in memory with a poignancy from which the sting had been drawn." The librarian who refuses a legacy is more than compensated by "the shadow of a secret, deception honouring a silent love." The recent widow, having sat up all night by the body of the husband she does not grieve for, "pulled the curtains back and the day came in. Hers was the ghost the night had brought, in her own image as she once had been." Nuala, contemplating the saints carved by her husband, shares what she sees as their assessment of things: "The world, not she, had failed."

Every story in this collection is strong. Like Chekhov's, Trevor's vision is clear-eyed -- resolutely without illusions, but not untender -- a sort of radiant pessimism. The title story virtually demands comparison with Chekhov's "Lady With the Little Dog." Both stories affirm the power of love. But Trevor's unnamed protagonist cannot bear the look in the eyes of strangers, which labels his love a mere "bit on the side." And so, where Chekhov's adulterer in the end accepts his difficult love, Trevor's insists on parting. Chekhov's lovers will have a possibly disastrous future together. Trevor's will have only a past. But their love is thereby guaranteed to survive intact: "They took that with them as they drew apart and walked away from one another, unaware that the future was less bleak than now it seemed, that in it there still would be the delicacy of their reticence, and they themselves as love had made them for a while."

Ann Harleman (www.annharleman.com) is the author of a story collection, "Happiness," and a novel, "Bitter Lake." She teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design.