Volume 28, Number 4 · March 19, 1981
Thin Ice
By Patricia Craig
Other People's Worlds
by William Trevor
The Viking Press, 243 pp., $10.95
The State of Ireland: Seventeen Stories and a Novella
by Benedict Kiely
David R. Godine, 389 pp., $14.95
Since The Old Boys appeared in 1964, William Trevor has written seven novels and four collections of short stories. His first novel displayed a kind of mannered sedateness reminiscent of Ivy Compton-Burnett's; since then, his natural precision and astringency have been tempered by a strain of informality, which often appears in the garrulous speech of underlings, home helpers, shopgirls, and the like. This is not without its dangers. In catching the authentic tones of the drab and vacuous, he has sometimes produced a drab and vacuous effect. At his weakest, in the novel Elizabeth Alone (1973), for example, he assembles a cast of dull people in dismal predicaments and imposes no firm outline on the events of their lives.
Review, 2901 words
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