SOURCE: "William Trevor and Other People's Worlds," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. CI, No. 1, Winter, 1993, pp. 138-44.

In the following mixed assessment of Two Lives and The Collected Stories, Allen derides the pedantic, overly-political nature of Trevor's short fiction set in and around Northern Ireland.

Afiçionados of the contemporary short story could undoubtedly summon up a dozen or so names if asked to identify the best living practitioners of the form. For me there are three now writing in English who dominate this genre: the Canadian Alice Munro, America's Peter Taylor, and the Anglo-Irish master William Trevor. (I'm tempted to expand the list to include John Updike, and I would add Eudora Welty and Hortense Calisher were there evidence that either is still writing short fiction.)

Munro, Taylor, and Trevor all possess the ability to suggest the contour of a whole life in a single transfiguring incident...