The Children of Dynmouth by William Trevor

For him the links between family and nation are primarily a matter of tone or suggestion. But Trevor's Irish novels haven't been as successful as either his short stories or the novels he sets in England. The persistence of heartbreak is of course a feature of Irish history as well. But those family sins are somehow also national ones, and so each story seems as well to bring what he called his 1986 collection, The News from Ireland. His Irish stories have always been more open to heartbreak than his English ones, but what's new is his emphasis on the persistence of that heartbreak - on the way 'family sins,' as the title story of his 1990 collection has it, find themselves handed on from generation to generation. His stories aren't as brittle or as funny as they used to be, I think because they now turn more often on Irish rather than English themes. Nuance is all and Trevor's mastery seems as much a miracle of understatement and compassion now as it did with his first great stories of 20 years ago. On the one hand that complaint is as pointless as carping about the repetition in Monet's paintings of waterlilies. To some readers, the short stories for which Trevor is best known have in the last decade seemed repetitive, as if his art hasn't developed.

I say 'long fiction' rather than novel because the book contains two stories, each the length of many works published as novels, but each with a unified intensity of mood that makes them splendid examples of what Henry James called 'the beautiful and blest nouvelle,' like his own 'Turn of the Screw' or 'The Aspern Papers.' TWO LIVES is William Trevor's finest work of long fiction since 1977's The Children of Dynmouth.

The Children of Dynmouth by William Trevor