Cheating at Canasta

William Boyd

magisterial new collection of short stories…the familiar ingredients are here: ordinary or downtrodden lives, many of them Irish, undergo a sudden transforming crisis, leading to death, betrayal, loss, numb acceptance or stoical suffering. Trevor is frequently cited as a type of Irish Chekhov: the dark, worldly, bleak nature of his stories is believed to be akin to the dark, worldly, bleak nature of Chekhov's short fiction. But this is a caricature both of Trevor and of Chekhov…Trevor is not the Irish Chekhov. He is, I think, sui generis, and in his 12 collections…he has created a version of the short story that almost ignores the form's hundred or so years of intricate evolution. These stories stay in the mind long after they're finished because they're so solid, so deliberately shaped and directed so surely toward their solemn, harsh conclusions. Perhaps there is an eighth type of short story after all: the Trevorian.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

The 12 stories of Trevor's latest collection blend an orchestra conductor's feel for subtlety with a monsignor's banishment of moral ambiguity. In "The Dressmaker's Child," a 2006 O. Henry Award winner, the future seems predetermined for rural mechanic Cahal, until the preteen daughter of the village dressmaker runs at his car with a stone in her hand. "Men of Ireland" has the elderly Father Meade being visited by Donal Prunty, 52, a onetime altar boy gone derelict with the years. Father Meade, complicit (or perhaps not) in Prunty's undoing, learns that the erosion of memory extirpates nothing and only compounds one's regrets. The widower Mallory of the title story finds that mortality does not quite do away with the need for role playing and reverse strategies in marriage. And when Mollie of "At Olivehill" is at last goaded by her sons into selling her deceased husband's woodlands, the earthmovers appear with the alacrity of enemy tanks, altering her internal landscape as well. The book as a whole recalls Joyce's Dubliners in making melancholia a powerful narrative device. (Oct.)

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Forbes

William Trevor, nearing 80, has had a monumental literary career, long ago securing a comfortable seat in the pantheon of Irish writers--good company there. And yet the elegant and occasionally chilling Cheating at Canasta, his 25th volume of fiction (watch out, Updike), is fresh cause to salute this master of the short story. Though a lovely, heartsick tale is set in Venice and another, unsettling one takes place in Paris, it is modern Ireland, a boomtown country of changing cultural mores, that dominates the collection. Several darker stories achieve a headlong momentum: A young mechanic flees a fatal accident, a pedophile lures a bold teenage girl, an outcast troublemaker blackmails a small-town priest. Others more patiently explore the knotty deceptions of human relationships: Nine years after her husband may or may not have killed his mistress, the heroine of "The Room" tests her own capacity for betrayal. So many crimes and duplicitous acts could make for heavy reading if it weren't for Trevor's graceful, rhythmic sentences--complex Jamesian constructions set beside beautifully plain statements of truth.—Taylor Antrim

The New York Times Book Review

[A] magisterial new collection . . . These stories stay in the mind long after they're finished.

The Boston Globe

These stories possess an unwavering moral center that is in itself a measure of greatness.

Library Journal

Further confirming Trevor's mastery of the short story, the 12 tales in his latest collection reveal the fragile interactions connecting people to one another. Consistent throughout is the suggestion that death-of a loyal pet, an odd child, a boy of 16, a beloved spouse, a sex offender's mother-brings characters together in complex and almost always unsettling ways. Trevor explores how his characters bear their losses to illuminate our own responses to personal damage. Some experience grace by sharing grief with strangers, as does the protagonist of the title story. Others, such as the matriarch in "At Olivehill," keep their sadness close by and are ultimately separated from those who love them. Ironically, in both instances, sharing and keeping memories allow these characters to commune with those they have lost. Trevor artfully maintains this ambivalence throughout this collection, rendering his tales in details and exchanges that brilliantly suggest what is humanly possible in respect to enormous suffering. As one character observes, "Love makes the most of pity, or pity of love, I don't know which" Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ6/15/07.]
—John G. Matthews

Kirkus Reviews

Another stellar collection from Trevor (A Bit on the Side: Stories, 2004, etc.). Blarney-free-shorn, too, of much of anything overtly lyrical or political or Catholic Gothic-these aren't standard-issue Irish tales. Yet Trevor gives us an unassailably real contemporary Ireland, quotidian and atmospheric as fog. In "The Dressmaker's Child," Cahal the mechanic lives in a small-town world of Ford Cortinas and WD-40, and yet collides with the uncanny. Spanish pilgrims he's chauffeuring to visit the Virgin of the Wayside, a statue whose miraculous tears have been debunked, kiss in his backseat, unaware of the thud as he hits a small girl on the dark road. Guilt descends and, his crime undetected, a year later he returns to the Virgin: Her marble face is moist. "Faith," meanwhile, concerns a difficult woman named Hester, given to "severity and suspicion," whose brother's improbable solicitude during her dark dying makes the tale one of the most convincing deathbed stories since Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Illyich." A dim tramp, Donal Prunty, returns home in "Men of Ireland" after failure in England. He's wretched and, hoping to share his wretchedness, blackmails a guileless priest by hinting that the old man is a pedophile like so many of his clerical brethren. "Diminished by the sins that so deeply stained his cloth, distrustful of his people," Father Meade hands over money to the thief then prays for him. In the marvelous title story, old Mallory redeems a promise to his recently dead wife to return to Harry's Bar in Venice and review the Italian sights the couple had once loved. In the famous bistro, he overhears a couple, stylish as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, bicker and pout andmiscommunicate. He mourns his loss and their waste of love. Profound.

The Barnes & Noble Review

As a writer, William Trevor long ago achieved the status of "beloved," which just goes to show you how strange the heart is. His preoccupations, after all, are loss, loneliness, waste, isolation, estrangement, betrayal, cruelty, adultery, sexual predation, murder, death, and, on the bright side, endurance and grinding expiation. He is a master at creating an air of menace, and his humor, now increasingly subterranean, is mordant. His novels are very fine, in some cases great, but the short story -- not a popular form -- is his true domain. Here he has no living equal in English.

Of the 12 stories collected in Cheating at Canasta, 7 are set in Ireland, the rest mostly in England. There are lesser stories here, but at least 7, 6 of them Irish, are well up to snuff -- four of which are real knockouts. So much for the census.

"Old Flame," the best of the English stories, is a chilly little number about a woman whose husband's long-ago-relinquished affair has obsessed her throughout the balance of their marriage. Extrapolating from steamed-open letters and eavesdropped phone calls, her relentless, in fact authorial, imagination has built the affair and its aftermath into a fully dramatized story, while her own life withers. This is a story within a story like a worm in an apple.

The New Ireland and the pass it has come to are present in these pages, most pungently in "Men of Ireland." Donal Prunty, a seedy ne'er-do-well and a chiseler, returns to Ireland in stolen shoes after 23 years in England. He cadges a lift to Gleban, his native village, and immediately heads off to the priest's house to extort money, claiming that the old man had plied him with drink and molested him when he was an altar boy. It's a lie; but after protesting against it, the saddened priest finally gives Prunty all the money in the house, knowing with disgust that he has paid for silence and feeling also that he has violated the obligations of Christian charity: "Guiltless, he was guilty, his brave defiance as much as a subterfuge as any of his visitor's. He might have belittled the petty offence that had occurred, so slight it was when you put it beside the betrayal of a Church and the shaming of Ireland's priesthood. He might have managed to say something decent to a Gleban man who was down and out in case it would bring consolation to the man, in case it would calm his conscience if maybe one day his conscience would nag. Instead he had been fearful, diminished by the sins that so deeply stained his cloth, distrustful of his people."

"At Olivehill" dwells on another species of betrayal characteristic of the present state of Ireland. It concerns an old landed Catholic family which had managed to preserve its estate against confiscation under the Penal Laws of the 17th and 18th centuries. All that's in the past, of course, and as the story's main character, Mollie -- wife to James, the head of the family -- muses, "faith's variations mattered less in Ireland all these years later, since faith itself mattered less and influenced less how people lived." Exactly so. But there is another faith rampant in the land, untrammeled by past inhibitions, and its objects are forward movement and gain.

Mollie has wished to spare the dying James the news that their sons intend to turn the estate into a golf course "in the hope that this would yield a more substantial profit than the land did." The old man dies; the plan is put in train. The fields are savaged, the woods come down, beeches and maples sold for timber. As tends to be the way with Trevor's miscreants, the sons feel no guilt. They, neither fools nor vulgar men as their mother knows, have been swept up in the tide of crass materialism and growth that so deforms Ireland today. Mollie sees the sin as hers. She should have let her husband know what was afoot: "His anger might have stirred their shame and might have won what, alone, she could not. That day, for the first time, her protection of him felt like a betrayal." The story's remaining pages are dominated by Mollie's remorse, her penance, and her full appreciation of this crime against Ireland's past.

Many of Trevor's themes are perfectly realized in "Faith," a story of almost preternatural narrative control. Bartholomew and Hester are brother and sister; she, three years older than him, severe, suspicious, and controlling: "Her bounden duty, she called it, looking after Bartholomew." They are poor, respectable Protestants who have lived with their parents in a cramped apartment on Maunder Street in Dublin. Bartholomew, "the soft touch of the family," is a clergyman in the moribund Church of Ireland, finding fulfillment in working with young people in Dublin. He was engaged to a woman he loved, but that ended, he later understands, because his intended sensed the nature of a future with Hester as sister-in-law.

After their parents' deaths, Hester gravitates towards her brother, intent on making her lot one with his. He succumbs helplessly to her machinations in obtaining a benefice for him in a terminally decaying parish in the country. Though he is miserably aware of his sister's interference in his life, it is Bartholomew's nature to forgive, just as it is to have faith. For years he sees Hester's sway over his destiny as part of some greater intent. And so, "the manner in which human existence -- seeming to be shaped by the vagaries of time and chance but in fact obedient to a will -- became the subject of more than one of Bartholomew's sermons.... That the physical presence of things, and of words and people, amounted to very little made perfect sense to Bartholomew."

Like so many of Trevor's creatures, Bartholomew is in exile from life, somehow adrift from the present. The past, itself not much, is the one thing he has in common with his sister, and so it makes up their life. "As the two aged the understanding between them that had survived the cramped conditions of Maunder Street was supported by reminiscence -- the smell of fresh bread every morning , the unexpected death of their mother, their father's mercilessly slow, the two cremations at Glasnevin. Seaside photographs taken at Rush and Bettystown were in an album, visits to both grandmothers and to aunts were remembered; and hearing other generations talked about were. The present was kept a little at bay; that congregations everywhere continued to dwindle, that no ground had been regained by the Church or seemed likely to be, was not often mentioned. Hester was indifferent to this. Bartholomew was increasingly a prey to melancholy, but did not let it show, to Hester or to anyone." The lean vigor of that passage is typical of Trevor's writing and he moves the entire story along with similar muscle.

Gradually and terribly, Bartholomew's faith, which had given some consolation and meaning to his barren existence in this dying backwater, begins to dissipate. Things are different with Hester. She too has faith, but it is prehensile, it has the resolute clench of certainty, and, indeed, of obliviousness, that made it possible for her to colonize her brother's life without qualm. "Hester noticed no change in her brother, and he had told her nothing. Her own fulfillment, through him, continued, her belief undiminished, her certainties unchallenged. In her daily life all she distrusted she still distrusted. Her eye was cold, her scorn a nourishment; and then, for Hester too when more time had passed, there was adversity."

Hester is dying. I will not say more; the story isn't over and besides, a successful short story, which this is in spades, is in the end ineffable. I will, however, give one further instance of Trevor's powerful economy with words and exquisite mastery of syntax. At the failing Hester's request, Bartholomew picks primroses: "That night they were on her bedside table, in a glass there'd been at Maunder Street." The subtle might of those simple words, their demotic arrangement so expressive of the pair's pitifully inadequate bond, is heartbreaking. Truly, few writers break hearts with such ruthlessness, with such austerity, and with such precision of feeling. This must be what we love about him. --Katherine A. Powers

Katherine A. Powers writes the literary column "A Reading Life" for the Boston Sunday Globe and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.