MILLICENT BELL
417
reference to historical issues. He says that he doesn't want to impose on his
characters anything more than the predicament they find themselves in.
But an enlightenment rarely given a name sometimes issues from some
scrap of ordinary life. The title story of his newest collection is, actually,
one of its failures, I think, partly because it departs from this reticence to
suggest by reference to a Renaissance painting of the Annunciation (such
a painting is even reproduced on the jacket) that sudden insight into her
life has been granted to a modern young woman who goes to Italy after
her lover has broken with her. Traveling alone, she stops at a
pensione
where
she came as a child with her parents before they divorced. In the local
church she contemplates its famous painting, moved by the strange lumi–
nousness in its atmosphere, something like the light that fills the street
when she comes out after there has been a downpour. At once, she
knows:
disappointed in her childhood, she had "asked too much of love." It is an
illumination hardly analogous to the Virgin's, though Trevor seems to want
us to regard it so. Generally, however, his epiphanies, like those in Joyce's
Dubliners,
emerge more modestly from his characters' conditions, from
their own limited vision which takes in what it can and no more. In anoth–
er of these recent stories, "A Bi t of Business," he relates the endeavors of
a pair of Dublin punks on the day when the city is concentrated on the
Pope's visit. While thousands are outdoors to watch the pontiff perform–
ing Mass, they break into apartments, cash in their loot and spend the
evening with a pair of floozie pickups. But their success is flawed. One of
the burgled apartments had not been vacant, after all. They had surprised
an elderly man watching the telly, had tied him to a chair and fled-and
know they can be identified. Of course, they should have killed him. As
they walk in the city crowds, hearing the talk about the great day, they
wonder "if the urge to kill was something you acquired."
Between the putative miracle of "After Rain" and such meager self–
discovery lie most of the revelations in Trevor's latest stories. Two women
who have been close since childhood find their friendship over after one
has promoted the other's adultery ("A Friendship"). A husband and wife
whose homosexual son fails to show up for his annual visit on his birthday
realize that they have always cared more for each other than for this child
who has failed them, and, since they feel little pain, they deserve to be
hated ("Timothy's Birthday"). A widow finds that a reunion with her
recently bereaved sister cannot come about because the sister has chosen
to pay a debt fraudulently charged to her dead husband ("Widows").
Having long cherished a charming but feckless friend as tonic diversion of
their own staid lives, a couple must accept that their daughter has fallen in
love with him ("Damian"). The children of two pairs of divorcing and
remarrying adul ts find themselves briefly together and build a private
