[In the following review, Lesser considers the concepts of truth and self-knowledge in After Rain.]

The great novels draw you in entirely, it seems, so that while you are reading them you forget you ever had another life. But the great short stories, in my experience, keep you balanced in midair, suspended somewhere between the world you normally inhabit and the world briefly illuminated by the author. You see them both at once and you feel them both at once: the emotions generated in you by the story carry over instantly and applicably to the life outside the book. This is why the best short stories can afford to be inconclusive. You, the reader, complete them by joining them back to your life—a life that, because it too is inconclusive, enables you to recognize the truth of the fictional pattern.

Everyone will have his own list of the best short stories. Mine includes most of Chekhov, one or two by James Joyce, a dozen or more from D. H. Lawrence and—in this same vein—a healthy selection from William Trevor. This Irishborn, English-domiciled writer, who is also an excellent novelist, gave us his Collected Stories a few years back. Now, as if to assure us that the well is far from dry, he offers a luminously disturbing new collection, After Rain.

Each of the 12 stories in this volume hinges on lying or concealment or omission of the truth. Deceptions and evasions permeate the book, from the brilliant opening story. "The Piano Tuner's Wives"—in which a blind man's second wife lies about reality in order to obliterate the visual memories left him by his first wife—to the final "Marrying Damian," in which an elderly couple doesn't quarrel "because ours are the dog days of marriage and there aren't enough left to waste: a dangerous ground has long ago been charted and is avoided now."

Both lying and its evil twin, excessive truth-telling are linked in these stories to various acts of cruelty—little cruelties (like a grown son's failure to attend the birthday dinner planned for him by his doting parents) as well as more significant crimes, ranging from burglary and fraud to sectarian violence and random homicide. But deception's major casualty, as might be expected, is the covenant of marriage. Sprinkled among these dozen stories are seven divorces, six cases of adultery, five instances of explicit sexual jealousy, two or three enduring but loveless marriages and four children from broken homes.

Mr. Trevor, though, is no simple-minded advocate of "family values," and what he does with this material is entirely other than what an indignant sociologist or a preaching moralist would do. If these stories are mainly quite sad, lacking the dark, ironic, Graham-Greene-style wit that colors most of Mr. Trevor's novels, they are nonetheless open-ended. And that absence of closure gives them something approaching optimism—if not the optimism of hope, then at any rate that of fairness. People suffer deeply in most of these stories, and many of them suffer unjustly, but Mr. Trevor never allows us to see only the victim's viewpoint. There is always another perspective, another interpretation, and with that distance comes the possibility of release, not only for us but for the suffering character as well. In a way, these stories are like a complicated, infinitely subtle, delicately inflected rendering of the Freudian notion that self-knowledge might bring freedom. But for this to be a Trevor truth, it must remain conditional.

The most overt example is the title story, "After Rain," which follows 30-year-old Harriet (one of those four children of divorce) on her solitary vacation in Italy. The title phrase itself refers to her brief but intense moment of revelation about the failures in her emotional life: "The rain has stopped when Harriet leaves the church, the air is fresher. Too slick and glib, to use her love affairs to restore her faith in love: that thought is there mysteriously. She has cheated in her love affairs: that comes from nowhere too."

Not content with giving her this degree of insight, the author intensifies Harriet's discovery by allowing her to connect it with a painting she has just seen in the church. "While she stands alone among the dripping vines she cannot make a connection that she knows is there. There is a blankness in her thoughts, a density that feels like muddle also, until she realizes: the Annunciation was painted after rain. Its distant landscape, glimpsed through arches, has the temporary look that she is seeing now. It was after rain that the angel came."

"After Rain" is more schematic than most of Mr. Trevor's stories, and as such is not one of my favorites. But what it beautifully illustrates is his usual ability to be both inside and outside the character at once. Here he gives that gift of double perception to Harriet herself: she experiences "blankness," "muddle," and then an annunciation. Elsewhere he gives it only to us—a strategy that is less therapeutic for the characters, perhaps, but somehow more moving.

I'm thinking for instance, of the last paragraph in "The Piano Tuner's Wives," where the authorial voice comes in from the outside to adjudicate between the first wife, Violet, and her jealous successor, Belle. Commenting on the second wife's lying contradiction of the first wife's descriptions of reality, Mr. Trevor calmly concludes: "Belle could not be blamed for making her claim, and claims could not be made without damage or destruction. Belle would win in the end because the living always do. And that seemed fair also, since Violet had won in the beginning and had had the better years."

This is not information that is available to any of the principal characters in the story: the piano tuner is blind and therefore cannot perceive the lies; Violet is dead and cannot dispute them; Belle is the sort of person who is incapable of stepping this far back from her situation. And yet something in the language of the observations—the past tense specificity of "that seemed fair," the colloquial formulation in "had the better years"—works directly against the all knowing voice of "claims could not be made without damage" or "Belle would win in the end." The implication is that Mr. Trevor's authorial knowledge is somehow contingent on the thoughts and expressions of his fictional creations, not self-sustaining and absolute. Like the blind piano tuner, he needs to listen to what his characters tell him: he may draw his own conclusions from their lies or truths, but he can have no direct, supervisory access to their reality.

Because of this gap, this space between author's knowledge and character's perception, William Trevor's stories have room to breathe. They are like something alive, shifting and changing each time you read them. The first time you read "A Day," about an alcoholic wife and an adulterous husband, you may blame him for her condition. The next time you may listen closely to the story's last line—"He is gentle when he carries her, as he always is"—and see him as the daily victim of her routine heavy drinking. The third time you may wonder if she has imagined the infidelity, or at least the extent of it. The fourth time you may decide that his gentle, tacit encouragement of her oblivion is in fact the worst aspect of his cruelty. And so on.

To free one's characters from the wheel of determinism is the greatest gift an author can give, and one of the rarest. It can't be done with any deus ex machina tricks, or we wouldn't believe it. The release, when it comes, needs to be true to the tragic reality of the story—and by extension, to our own tragic reality. The emotion we are left with can contain resignation but can't be limited to it, it can include hope, but not at the risk of denying pain. William Trevor knows all this. What is more remarkable is the way he infuses this authorial knowledge into his stories, so that his own role in their creation fades to invisibility, leaving us in the presence of something very much like life.