[Theroux is an American fiction writer, critic, and travel writer who, since 1963, has lived outside the United States, first traveling to Africa with the Peace Corps and later settling in England. Many of his novels and short stories have foreign settings—Kenya in Fong and the Indians (1968), Malawi in Girls at Play (1969) and Jungle Lovers (1971), Singapore in Saint Jack (1973)—and feature characters whose conflicting cultural backgrounds, as well as their personal conflicts, provide the substance of the story. Critics often find Theroux's fictional works to be sardonic expositions of chaos and disillusionment presented with wit, imagination, and considerable narrative skill. Theroux has also produced several nonfiction accounts of his travels, including The Great Railway Bizarre (1975) and The Old Patagonian Express (1979). As a critic, he has written a study of Trinidadian novelist and essayist V. S. Naipaul and frequently reviews books for several major English and American periodicals. In the following essay, he offers a favorable assessment of the short stories comprising The Ballroom of Romance.]

The English short story writer resembles the Russian writer whose work is considered hateful and disaffected by the Kremlin. Both men have to send their stories abroad to be published and appreciated. The half-dozen outlets for short stories in England, only one or two of them monthly magazines, can hardly accommodate story writers of the achievement of Angus Wilson, L. P. Hartley, William Sansom, V. S. Pritchett, Gabriel Fielding, Francis King, Muriel Spark, William Trevor, Elizabeth Taylor—and there must be many more. The short story is being written as vigorously in this country as it always has, but it is seldom published here with any vigour. Typically, the English writer's story appears in an American magazine; it is collected and the volume of stories receives a cursory notice, an abbreviated paragraph simply indicating its publication and a lightning glance at its contents. It is discouraging, and publishers have begun to consider short stories an obligatory but uncommercial philanthropy, a gesture for culture for which they will be respected but not rewarded. It is an attitude the poet knows well, and it has something to do with the decline of the monthly magazine which welcomed poetry and stories; now both poet and short story writer are regarded as cranks, hobbyists, part-timers.

A short story is a twenty-minute read, but surely the pleasure of the short story is not the collection, for no collection can be read straight through like a novel. One stops and ponders after each story, and with the best stories one feels like closing the book and saving the rest for later. It is uniquely suited, like a poem, for a magazine where on its discovery the reader gets a little thrill. Few English readers are ardent magazine subscribers; that they are regular library-goers (unlike Americans, who are members of book clubs) must account for the unpopularity of English monthlies and the appearance of stories in collections. And that new phenomenon, the televised story, has grown out of the public's indifference to the magazine story.

So William Trevor, an immensely gifted short story writer, is known as a writer of television plays, though all the plays he has written have been adaptations of his short stories. But you can hardly blame him. His new collection, The Ballroom of Romance—two or three of the stories have appeared on television—confirms the reputation he gained on the publication of his previous collection, The Day We Got Drunk On Cake (best since The Wrong Set, best since the war, critics said). Last year, in a reflective piece on English writers in general, a literary editor suggested that Mr Trevor might try travelling to some equatorial outpost, a former colony or infant tropical republic, and writing about it. The suggestion was wellintended and may have been prompted by a suspicion that having turned up such surprising creatures in what were thought to be rather ordinary London suburbs, he might do the same in, say, Tunapuna, Kandy or the suburbs of Lahore. Ivy Eckdorf caused quite a bit of talk in O'Neill's hotel, but what if she had taken her camera to Raffles in Singapore! In places that are familiar and unremarkable Mr Trevor has acquainted us with the strange and startling: consider those excitable geriatrics in The Old Boys, the odd assortment of residents in The Boarding House, Mrs Eckdorf, Miss Gomez.

The stories in The Ballroom of Romance are set in England and Ireland, and look who he has found: Miss Awpit, Mrs Maugham, Mr Gipe and Mr Belhatchet, Wragget, Dympna and Mr Dicey. You don't have to know much more than their names. It is plain that Miss Awpit looks after mad old Mrs Maugham; Gipe is a handyman; and Belhatchet is the man in "Kinkies" who drugged a poor girl's orange juice. Wragget—who else? —was beaten at Digby-Hunter's school, and died, and Dympna the serving girl is going to tell the police. Mr Dicey is the postman who steams letters open.

"'Wragget' is a terrifying name," I said to a man. His reply was, "You scare easily." Maybe so, but it would be hard to find a better one for this poor wretch. When a Trevor character is sympathetic he is awarded a sympathetic name, like Malcolmson in "Access to the Children", or Eleanor who appears in two stories, first as a schoolgirl in "Nice Day at School" and then as Belhatchet's victim (she is ten years older) in "Kinkies." Mr Trevor's style matches the ingenuity of his naming; it is spare and filled with suggestion—the sentence " 'vederci, ' said Mr Belhatchet, replacing his green telephone" is worth a whole page of description. But the characters are more than their names, weirdness is not their only attribute, and though the characters in Mr Trevor's novels are quite different from his short story characters (the former are several degrees more perverse than the latter, as well as—usually—from a different social class), Mr Trevor's achievement has been to create, by means of the clearest and most original prose in this generation and a compassionate balance of fascination and sympathy, real people of flesh and blood out of characters another writer would dismiss as goons or drudges.

It is for the women in this collection that one feels most deeply. Indeed, the thread that runs through all the stories is of brittle or urgent femininity thwarted by rather boorish maleness. Mr Trevor's men are feckless, or else malicious snobs, or drunkards, or comradely and exclusive old boys; his women are victims of, at once, their own strength and the men's weakness, isolated by their longings or by the perversity of their husbands or lovers. Malcolmson in "Access to the Children" has forced a separation on his wife while he lived briefly with his American girlfriend Diana; but the story is of his decline, of his wife's fortitude, and at the point when one believes there might be a reconciliation one realises how his wife's love permitted his infidelity, and how, having taken unfair advantage of this love, he has risked and lost everything, including the attention of his children. Eleanor in "Nice Day at School" and Bridie in the title story cling to an idea of love and romance while understanding that they will have to face a life with louts. Mavie tries hard to please Mr McCarthy in "The Forty-seventh Saturday", but he remains a visitor, almost a client, and will not let her love shake him out of the routine of his fantasy. And so it goes, wives and lovers getting short shrift, and even accepting it when they are warned away from it as in "The Grass Widows." This is one of the best in the collection; here, a woman late in life realises how boring and trivial her husband is, and in ironic circumstances attempts to save a newly-married woman from the same fate; but the younger woman is offended by the warning and finally chatted into accepting her husband's immaturity and inattention.

Some of the stories are heartrending, but Mr Trevor writes with a light touch, without sentimentality and always with humour. There is a crotchety precision about his narration; what other writer would be able to get away with the sentence, "No alcoholic liquor was ever served in the Ballroom of Romance, the premises not being licensed for this added stimulant"? He is the master of exasperation, of the person speaking at length in tones of formal annoyance; and he is at his best when dealing with a condition of lucidity one has always thought of as madness. His real skill lies in his ability to portray this behaviour as a heightened condition of life; in his work there is no madness, but there is much suffering.