Volume 52, Number 18 · November 17, 2005
The Saving Remnant
By Fintan O'Toole
A Bit on the Side
by William Trevor
Viking, 245 pp., $24.95
James Joyce's short story 'Two Gallants,' published in the collection Dubliners in 1914, is wonderfully redolent of early-twentieth-century Dublin. Though laconic and somewhat enigmatic, it could be studied with profit by any historian of the period. Its clipped, concentrated narrative of two wastrels in their early thirties exploiting the servant girl with whom one of them is having an affair reveals a vast amount about the time and place in which it unfolds. Assumptions about class and gender, and attitudes toward food, sex, and money, hover around every line. When, therefore, William Trevor wrote 'Two More Gallants,' published in his collection The News from Ireland in 1986 and set largely in the mid-1950s, in which the same serving maid supposedly tells the story to another pair of Dublin flaneurs, a reader might expect that the purpose of the exercise would be to measure the distance between Joyce's Ireland and Trevor's.
Review, 3899 words
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