Cheating at Canasta

Starred review from June 11, 2007
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.

Starred review from August 1, 2007
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 deathof a loyal pet, an odd child, a boy of 16, a beloved spouse, a sex offender's motherbrings 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, "LJ" 6/15/07.]John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ., Pullman

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2007
This isTrevors twenty-sixth book of fiction, and he has long been recognized as a master of the short story. What requires recognition as well by the appearance of his latest collection of stories is not simply evidence ofcontinued mastery but also of a capability forheightened performance: not simply maintenance but improvment, which is an amazing credit for someone with his longevity.Trevors prose has always been limpid, concise, and approachable; it remains so, but what is intriguing, and relatively new for him, is a reliance on inference: hints and suggestions about characters and circumstances often standing in for out-and-out specificity. Trevor is a virtuoso in short-story construction, keeping the story line to the fore, with no elaborate and distraction-threatening backstory woven in, only minimal referencing of past events to contextualize those in the present. Fromthe poignant title storyabout a middle-aged man whose wife has recently died, returning alone to their favorite Venice restaurant and, overhearing a young couples arguing, thinking My God, what they are wasting in pricleess time together; to a sobering working out, inBravado, of the contemporary theme of youth violence, Trevor offers proof he cant be labeled stale inpresentationor old-fashioned in understanding of contemporarylife.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)