William Trevor has established a solid reputation both in Britain and America as an exceptionally sensitive, morally concerned writer whose forte appears to be rendering comic pathos, whether in his novels or in his short stories. Although born in Ireland, he has lived for many years in England, where his fiction is more frequently set than in his native land. Perhaps his Protestant background gave him a comparatively easy access to English society. The country that he has really made his own, however, is the rarely mapped one of the socially displaced--not tramps or hobos or prostitutes, though these may appear in Trevor's novels and stories, as much as those who move through life fundamentally alone and cultureless, ill-versed in either their own or their larger society's make-up. Often his people are victims of their own half-understood fantasies, obsessive attachments to unreciprocating others, to animals or objects. His...