After Trevor
Last Stories by William Trevor. Viking, 2018, $26.00 cloth.
SOME YEARS ago, when I had placed one of my first stories with a literary journal—rising by a stroke of what had seemed impossible fortune to the surface of that forbidding slush pile—I asked the editors to send a copy to my favorite professor.
A few weeks had passed when, being nearby, I stopped in at her office in the cold, brutalist English department building on campus.
“Sit down,” she said. “I enjoyed your story.” The magazine was visible beneath a stack of papers on her desk.
“I am proud of you.”
I thanked her. I was proud, too, I said, and grateful to her.
We chatted awhile, enjoying this new thing between us: I was no longer a student. We were simply two writers.
At length, she said, “Have you seen the new Trevor?”
We had spent a year reading the work of the Irish writer William Trevor (I for the first time, she for what must have been the third or fourth), starting with and , and continuing with his novels: , , , . He was by then already celebrated as among the language’s preeminent living writers—still preoccupied with
