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Separate Lives, Equal Dreams
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20179 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1992 |
2,489 Words |
| Author
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Gregory Wolfe
Gregory Wolfe is the founder and coeditor of Image: A Journal
of the Arts and Religion, and a frequent contributor to The
World & I. |
TWO LIVES
William Trevor
New York: Viking, 1991
374 pp., $21.95
On this side of the Atlantic, William Trevor has been, for many years, a novelist more praised than read. Neither his fiction nor his public personas are of the sort that tends to draw attention to themselves. For thirty years, Trevor has remained a remarkably pure writer of fiction: He does not obtrude himself into the public eye by writing biographies, essays, reviews, or appearing on talk shows as a cultural commentator or political crusader. He has been content to let his nineteen novels and short story collections speak for themselves.
Trevor's fiction is quieter than that of some other contemporary British novelists who have become popular, such as Iris Murdoch's sprawling novels of ideas, Salman Rushdie's controversial reinterpretations of cultural traditions, and the stylistic experimentalism of Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. The typical Trevor novel or story is set in provincial Ireland or England, and focuses on what one critic has called the "socially displaced": characters who inhabit the margins of society. Trevor's style is extremely subtle and suggestive; it does not reach out and grab the reader by the throat.
There are signs, however, that a growing number of discerning readers in America are coming to appreciate Trevor for the consummate literary artist that he is. Joyce Carol Oates has pointed out that the very aspects of Trevor's fiction that have kept it from being noticed here are its greatest strengths. Oates has contrasted Trevor, and a number of other British novelists, like V.S. Naipaul, who write in a more traditional narrative mode, with the majority of American writers. According to Oates, Trevor, Naipaul, and their ilk are "far less concerned with formal virtuosity than their American counterparts, and far more explicitly concerned with the moral dimensions of their art . . . they are ore readable . . . and they are more entertaining."
If Trevor can be thought of as an experimentalist, it is in the range and insights of his moral imagination, and in the pathos and irony that surround his displaced characters. But Trevor, it should be stressed, is a moral writer who never becomes moralistic or explicitly didactic. His narratives are characterized by their delicate balance between compassion and
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