A winning hand
William Trevor's new collection delivers breathtakingly masterful stories and, yes, more bleakness
Cheating at Canasta: Stories
By William Trevor
Viking, 232 pp., $24.95
With a half-century of fiction behind him, William Trevor's stories carry a signature of such unerring certainty that they might as well be cast in stone. There is, first off, the circumstance: some pileup on the road of humanity where fatalism and sorrow intersect. And there are the characters, rendered indelibly with one spare trait - a facial expression of vacancy, say, or a hobby of stamp collecting, or the lingering, sickening waft of sweet perfume. Most of all, though, there is the delivery: the solemn compassion, the bulletproof telling of a story that couldn't possibly unfold any other way.
It is the voice and confidence of a master, but if Trevor by now owns the territory - the bleak realism of a modern Ireland - his sovereignty is borne out by the finest stories in "Cheating at Canasta." Trevor was a wood sculptor before he turned to fiction in the 1950s, and whatever powerful force insisted that a form existed within the tree is still the sensibility that defines his stories. As with Chekhov, the distillation is so pure and complete you have to go back with a magnifying glass to see how he did it. Even that won't always tell you. In the first story, "The Dressmaker's Child," a garage worker in rural Ireland agrees to take two vacationing Spaniards to see a weeping statue of the Virgin of Pouldearg, without telling them the miracle has been discredited. On the road back, something terrible happens - terrible and accidental and yet somehow unsurprising. Cahal, the mechanic, has the option to ignore this blurry tragedy that was probably his responsibility; the choice he will make is the story's axis.
The reader, with a growing sense of dread, knows how this story will turn out - not because it's predictable, but because the world Trevor creates, its conditions of redemption and regret, seems inevitable. The clues are dropped with sweet precision: Cahal's provincialism, his wish to impress, his uneasy desire to make a buck. Trevor's is a determinism imbued with kindness; his people tend to have hard lives, but the paths they take are theirs alone, yoked by penitence and remorse. In "Bravado," a gang of teenagers in Dublin go too far one night on the walk home. The tone from the outset is one of ominous sorrow - only in a Trevor story can you feel regret for the future. The sin is transformed into service, the petitioners of life's cruelties "belonging where the thing had happened." The thing might be a violence of the heart or a death that could have been postponed; but the nexus of the story, always, is how Trevor's characters - or all of us - will measure up in the anguish of the moment.
Describing the events of Trevor's fiction usually lends itself to grimness that sounds worse in the telling than the stories actually feel - his narrative is imbued not with hope but with something better, which is truth. The girl in "An Afternoon" - who claims to be 16 but is younger - meets a pedophile who found her on a phone chat line; she is so intimately rendered that the life she is fleeing - the smoky kitchen, the cruel mother - seems as dangerous as the man she is headed toward. The shifting perspectives of the story make it all the more horrid: the girl's desperate innocence, the man's sneaky pathos. But even freedom is only transient salvation; in a Trevor story, beyond the closing sentence, there is always tomorrow to be faced down.
What happens in any powerful fiction, particularly the shorter form, is surrounded and dictated by history; in Ireland, this milieu is one of barren economic struggle and the promise and oppression of religion. In the story "At Olivehill," a widowed matriarch takes to her room to avoid seeing her land destroyed by progress. When her son tries to reason with her - "The past is a long way off, Mamma" - she simply replies, "It's there, though." That's as bare-boned a definition of yesterday's reach as you're likely to get, and yet Trevor gives the woman's interior thoughts a more elaborate palette: "Memory in its ordinary way summoned harvested fields, and haycocks and autumn hedges, the first of the fuchsia, the last of the wild sweetpea. It brought the lowing of cattle, old donkeys resting, scampering dogs, and days and places." The past is there, indeed.
As is the question of faith, and it hovers throughout the stories in "Cheating at Canasta," whether torment or comfort, whether the belief in God or in some glimmer of all things possible. The title story is the shortest of the collection, and its card-game sleight refers to a man whose wife is giving way to dementia; he lets her win at cards to give her the thrill of what they had, even as he watches their future disappear with her memories. In the deceptively simple "A Perfect Relationship," a soft-spoken, middle-aged language teacher loses the love of his life - then makes a sacrifice for her even larger than his own loss. If the church itself has lost its sway - its dictates lingering "like husks caught in old cobwebs" - the world view of an ordained will triumphing over chaos still pervades. This assumption makes the death of a sister in "Faith" more than bearable: not necessarily the promise of God, but the unshakeable supremacy of time.
The final, wrenching story, "Folie à Deux," concerns the chance meeting of two men in Paris who had been childhood friends in Ireland. Wilby, a stamp collector and the more outwardly successful of the two, is forced to confront a monstrous act the men committed when they were boys - a memory of "a child's tormenting panic not yet constrained by suppression as later it would be." The pain of innocence, in other words, inevitably gives way to the adult's sometimes monstrous ability to forget. I found this story nearly unbearable. And yet the worst characters throughout "Cheating at Canasta" - its crooks and perpetrators - are the ones who feel nothing at all. The broken soul at the end of the story clings instead to his memory of a haunted sea - the terrible truth "he honours because it matters still." However mournful in the world they portray, these stories possess an unwavering moral center that is itself a measure of greatness.
Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com. 