[In the following excerpt, Williams considers Trevor's subtlety in the stories in After Rain.]

In William Trevor's twelve stories [After Rain], subtlety is the game, though he might do better with less. Subtlety can be wearing. One pattern is evident throughout: a series of events and an eccentric center, often a bit quirky, to explain things, the events sometimes testing the limits of our capacity to be bored, the center sometimes arriving at the artificial, more often hitting paydirt, some unexpected mystery or truth. A few summaries will illustrate.

A man sends a substitute to a party for him in “Timothy's Birthday.” The sub is a hoodlum whose very presence in the home of his parents is spiteful. He eats their food, drinks their liquor, and steals a little keepsake which he later pawns. He also steals the birthday boy's car. One might think there is something wrong with Timothy for setting this all in motion. But, no, the wrong is with the parents. They loved each other too much. The son was always jealous of their love because it excluded him.

Two more hoodlums (“A Bit of Business”) find the Pope's visit to Dublin an opportune time to go on a spree. They steal a car, burglarize several houses, sell the goods to a fence, and celebrate their success with a night on the town topped off by midnight sex with two bar girls. When all is over, they feel something is wrong. It is not remorse for wrongdoing, but regret for not having killed an old man who saw them steal. They walk home, “both of them wondering if the nerve to kill was something you acquired.”

The title story, “After Rain,” hints at inevitability. We are forever encountering the failed romance of a sensitive woman who tries to shake it off by taking a holiday at an Italian pensione which she knew as a child. In this story, Harriet walks, she observes, it rains, she examines a painting of the Annunciation in the local church. When it stops raining, she thinks: “the Annunciation was painted after rain. Its distant landscape … has the temporary look that she is seeing now. It was after rain that the angel came: those first cool moments were a chosen time.” And the reader wonders whether these lines suggest that Harriet is also pregnant.

To hear Gilbert's mother tell it, people just don't like Gilbert. There's something strange about him. His presence causes his father to split, it ruins her chances with subsequent lovers, it leaves his co-workers cool towards him. She suspects him of secret crimes: car theft, arson, the murder of Carol Dickson. But this is not a whodunit. It is another kind of mystery, the mystery of Gilbert's birth. The mother knows that given his start in life, anything could go wrong. (“She had willed him to be born” suggests that his father had wanted to abort him.) That is why she worries.

A deal is made with Mulreavy (“The Potato Dealer”) to marry Ellie and keep her shame a secret. For ten years she is satisfied with the arrangement. Then she suddenly decides that the daughter should know her real father, a young priest whom Ellie has not seen since but still loves. When Ellie gives away the secret, she calls down upon herself and her family the shame they had tried to hide. Why this single-minded urge to destruction? The story's answer says something about being at once Irish, Catholic, and female.

In “Lost Ground,” sixteen-year-old Milton Leeson sees a vision. St. Rosa, dressed in black, approaches him in the apple orchard, kisses him on the lips, and moves him to tell the people about her. That creates a problem. His minister says Protestants do not obey Catholic saints; the parish priest says Catholic saints do not appear to Protestants. Milton is rejected by both sides. His own family considers him a disgrace. They imprison him in his bedroom to prevent his preaching. But since the urge will not leave him, they eventually must find a permanent solution. The ending is as black as it sounds, the mystery of it even blacker.