SOURCE: "The Plain People of Ireland," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4676, November 13, 1992, p. 19.

O'Donoghue is an Irish poet, critic and editor. In the following favorable review of The Collected Stories, he discusses the defining characteristics of Trevor's short stories.

Graham Greene said that William Trevor's Angels at the Ritz (1975) was "one of the best collections, if not the best collection since Joyce's Dubliners". Leaving aside the extravagance of this (Greene is bound to like Trevor: the Collected's opening story, "Meeting in Middle Age", is like Greene without the metaphysics), the Dubliners parallel—unavoidable as it is in a collection of Irish stories with major claims—is misplaced. The stories of Dubliners are in the romantic mode and focus on the individual; the narrative is taken over by the characters ("Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet").

Trevor is no romantic; his stories, like...