SOURCE: Schirmer, Gregory A. “‘Such Tales of Woe’: The Short Stories.” In William Trevor: A Study of His Fiction, pp. 85-121. London: Routledge, 1990.

In the following essay, Schirmer provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of Trevor's short fiction.

Three years after the appearance of his second novel, The Old Boys, Trevor published his first collection of short stories, The Day We Got Drunk on Cake (1967). Like The Old Boys, this book seemed more the work of an experienced, accomplished author than the efforts of a relative novice. Its twelve stories are remarkably consistent in quality, and many of the formal characteristics of The Old Boys—the precise diction, the use of concrete, extremely suggestive details, the sparse, economical plots and sub-plots constructed around parallelism and juxtaposition, the carefully modulated ironies—prove at least as effective in these stories as they are in the novel.

The promise of The...