Book Reviews

The Hill Bachelors: Stories

Viking, 245 pp, $22.95

There's an echoing sadness in missed opportunities, and William Trevor captures every nuance of it in The Hill Bachelors, his latest collection of short stories. The tales masterfully detail the moments when lives might change -- and the quiet ways they go on without doing so.

Trevor writes exquisitely of the disaffected, of the lonely people you notice only to pity and intend to invite over to dinner but never do. In the title story, young Paulie heads to the family's remote Irish farm for his father's funeral, knowing full well that he'll be expected to stay on and help his mother. If he does so, he loses Patsy Finucane and the chance to lead a family life -- no woman wants the soul-breaking existence out in the hills. Yet he stays, moving into the farming life without question, just a simple shouldering of fate. "Guilt was misplaced, goodness hardly came into it. ... Enduring, unchanging, the hills had waited for him, claiming one of their own."

It's the soul-breaking Trevor captures so well: the moment when a wedding rehearsal game drives a spiritual wedge between a bridal couple, when a quirky middle-aged man is quietly rejected by the married woman he loves, the way he never admits his love to begin with.

Inarticulateness and a lack of questioning run through Trevor's characters; they waste little thought on how they arrived where they are, don't think to cry out against it. A widower waits vainly for the return of the woman he hoped to marry, but she instead swindles him out of his meager savings. He isn't enraged, but quietly accepting. "He did not dwell upon his mood. It was simply there." And yet there's an undercurrent of knowledge, of the characters sensing the meaning of what they accept, even if they can't articulate it -- and it is this that gives the stories their power.

Trevor renders his characters sparely, dispassionately. Most of the stories are set in rural Ireland and carry the flavor of the rocky, desolate beauty of its west coast. In the past five years, Ireland has grown into a bustling place, with an expanding economy, more jobs to fill than there are people to take them, and a rising sense of hopefulness among the young. It's a sharp contrast to the bleak landscape of Trevor's Ireland, and you cannot help but wish that as the Irish poverty passes, so too will the unspoken, unfulfilled yearnings of its people. And yet you know that in Trevor's world it will not.