Short stories aren't novels—they're shorter. Short stories snatch at life and give us only a concentrated episode or several moments—or thin out an epic chronicle to the bareness of a Bible parable. The point in either case is that this quick read (done at a sitting, as Poe insisted) isn't just a crumb from a loaf; it's a round bagel with a mysterious hole of implication, a tale whose strength, as William Trevor says, “lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in”—quite a different thing. Writing short stories is a high and special art, and only some novelists are good at it; most are not. Many great writers are better when they write briefly than when they don't. Faulkner, who wrote well either way, thought it was harder to write a good short story than a good novel. In a novel, he said, “you can be more careless; you can put more trash in it, and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to a poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right.”

Just the same, we are likely to rank the accomplished short story writer under the novelist. We meet short stories in quickly thrown out magazines, while novels, though they used to appear in installments in monthlies or weeklies, now come to us directly in the presumably permanent form of expensive books. It may be years before a story is gathered up with others in a book. Meanwhile, a story seems less serious than a novel even when exhibited in that high chic showcase, the New Yorker—sandwiched between fact pieces and cartoons and hyperbolic ads for Versace clothes or Absolut vodka—reading for the odd moment, or to pass time in a dentist's waiting room, or on a plane. How often I have tried vainly to find again, in copies of the magazine still around the house, some jewel by William Trevor, Mavis Gallant or Alice Munro, all three of whom have appeared there regularly! This master and these two mistresses of short fiction have also reprinted their stories in periodic small collections—some of these already out of print—but only in a late gesture have decided to wrap up a parcel the size of a big novel—Gallant and Munro just now, Trevor four years ago (The Collected Stories, Viking, 1992, 1,261 pages). Trevor and Gallant are both in their seventies, and there is a finality implied by their “collected.” But Gallant's title is disingenuous; her chosen fifty-two are about half of her stories already in print. Trevor's eighty-seven stories written over thirty years seemed a more final gesture, but as long as this compulsive writer lives his record is under revision, and a supplementary dozen are now presented. Munro, at sixty-six, is only a little younger, and her stories, too, have been massing behind her for as long as Trevor's and Gallant's; her “selected” admits the existence of at least as many again elsewhere, and more still to be written.

Perhaps, says Gallant, stories shouldn't really come at a reader all at once. She calls her own heavy book an object “fit to press cucumbers,” and warns, “[s]tories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.” So they can—though dips and departures make it possible, in the end, to see how the writer has defined herself, sometimes successfully and sometimes less so. Trevor's big book contained no such warning. But dipping in and going away and coming back to read one and then another of the stories in it provided the opportunity of discrimination. Some were among the best ever written, some trivial exercises. Looking back at his comprehensive volume puts the new stories—a few unimpressive, a few very good, and one a masterpiece—into the frame of his decided achievement. By this process you can come to think of him, as of Gallant and Munro, the way you think of Chekhov, Maupassant, James, Lawrence, Joyce, Hemingway, or whomever you put on your list of the greatest.

Despite the compact intensity of a Trevor story, the power of his best writing has always sprung from a realist attentiveness which makes visible things seem caught on high resolution film—the way a character looks, the precisely observed scene—a novelist's gift. But plenitude of detail can be, in novels, just that pile-up Faulkner called “trash.” Realism works differently in a Trevor story. “A Choice of Butchers,” which relates the way a small boy, a butcher's son, comes to want someone else for his father, begins with a paragraph describing the staircase in the narrator's remembered home—the oatmeal colored wallpaper; the stairs, uncarpeted where they led to the room of the maid, Bridget, carpeted below; the mats outside the bedroom doors; the hall with its hallstand, potted plant and figure of the Virgin and framed picture of cattle; and other items that summarize in a symbolic way the orderly propriety of a tradesman's family life. And then, the paragraph ends with a sentence that makes hallucinatory total recall explicable: “It was against a background of the oatmeal shade and the oxen in the dawn that I, through the rails of the banisters on the upper landing, saw my father kissing Bridget at the end of one summer holiday.” A visionary hyperawareness justified by a symbolic intent and psychological probability is part of Trevor's art.

But his use of description is only one of his means of structuring meaning. In his richest stories, those dealing with Irish life, his narrative is a poetic interweaving of sensation and memory, present and past, personal and public time. In “The Distant Past,” fifty years separate 1968 from the day when the Protestant Middletons, brother and sister, had been locked into an upstairs room of their George II house outside Munster while men waited downstairs to murder British soldiers. Quaint and eccentric and poor, their sterile sibling union somehow representing the decay of their kind, they became, as the years passed thereafter, relics at whom the town smiled when they rode in their Ford Anglia displaying the Union Jack on Elizabeth II's Coronation Day. But everything changed. “Had they driven with a Union Jack now they might, astoundingly, have been shot.” In “Beyond the Pale,” four English visitors to the Antrim coast encounter a contemporary tragedy, the suicide of a fellow guest—someone Irish and “beyond the pale”—at a tourist hotel catering to others like themselves. Only Cynthia had spoken to the stranger and learned his story; the dead young man had killed his sweetheart after she became a terrorist. But neither her companions nor the English hotel owner want to hear what Cynthia knows. She alone responds sympathetically not only to this death but to the immemorial struggles which mark the region for an Irish consciousness. But this is not all. Cynthia, herself a victim of tyranny and hypocrisy, suddenly is empowered to speak truth by this experience—the truth not of public but of personal history. She reveals that she knows that her husband is the lover of the other woman in their party. It is this other Englishwoman whom Trevor chooses as his narrator, so making us unwillingly participate in her killing hatred for Cynthia as though private character provides an analog for politics. And in still another Irish story, “Attracta,” past and present, the anguish of history and individual experience, are mingled again. When she was eleven someone told a Protestant girl the true story of her parents' death, how they had been killed by mistake in an ambush meant for the Black and Tans. She understands, then, why a mill owner and his Catholic mistress have always been kind to her. They had put down the booby traps. Now a spinster school mistress, she reads in the newspaper about a woman whose soldier husband was murdered in northern Ireland and his head mailed home in a biscuit tin, how this woman then went to Belfast to join the peace movement, and how she committed suicide after being raped by her husband's murderers. The teacher tries to tell her class that despite such horrors reconciliation and peace are possible. Her parents' killers had repented and changed.

Trevor has denied that he has any particular message to give, and, unlike the three just summarized, many of his stories seem to make little 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 [After Rain] 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 luminousness 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 another of these recent stories, “A Bit 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 performing 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 adults find themselves briefly together and build a private dream-world, play-acting at being their elders. Torn apart by new adult combinations, they realize that “the easy companionship that had allowed them to sip cocktails and sign the register of the Hotel Grand Splendide had been theirs by chance, a gift thrown out from other people's circumstances. Helplessness was their natural state” (“Child's Play”).

Most of these stories represent the side of Trevor which, in the past, has produced many deft vignettes of modern life with an English locale or English characters; and, if employing Irish material, giving that choice no special significance. After all, he has lived most of his long life in England. But the strongest of them have a more essential origin in his ineradicable Irishness and especially that “lace curtain” Protestant Ireland into which he was born. This was not the seignorial world of lingering wealth and authority which Elizabeth Bowen knew, but that of the Protestant remnant on hard-worked farms and in the poor, small towns of the south where life for Catholics and Protestants alike is straitened. In Trevor's stories of this kind, the helplessness of women—and sometimes of children—repeatedly illustrates the restrictedness of human options. In the new collection, Ellie, who will bear the child of a priest she has loved, is made to marry the gross older man who, for taking her, will inherit her uncle's farm (“The Potato Dealer”). “Lost Ground,” the prize of this new lot, makes a child's consciousness the center of a fable of modern Ireland.

In this story, too, religion, in its ambiguous mingling with politics, is a source of insight and not merely an ironic backdrop, like the Pope's Dublin visit in “A Bit of Business.” No apparition could be more ordinary—more unlike the Annunciation angel in “After Rain”—than the woman observed by a Protestant farmer's son in his father's orchard one day in 1989. Milton Leeson thinks she has been stealing apples, but she kisses him and tells him that she is Santa Rosa and that he must not be afraid. What he must not fear, it devolves, is his mission to preach forgiveness and the end of bloodshed. He has never heard of Santa Rosa, and the local Catholic priest, to whom he goes for information, is chiefly annoyed that she has appeared to a Protestant instead of to a Catholic boy. That summer, as always, his family had participated in the annual celebration of “King William's victory over the Papist James in 1690”—a march of local Protestants down the silent, shuttered main street of the little Catholic town. When he begins his preaching in the neighborhood, Milton is hauled home by his horrified family and kept locked up, and is finally killed by his own elder brother and a fellow terrorist from Belfast. Trevor makes this happen in the most matter-of-fact fashion while depicting the not-at-all monstrous family forced to come to terms with Milton and to participate in his murder—his righteous but bigoted father, his mother and his sister and her husband, the local Protestant minister, as well as that elder brother who belongs to a “paramilitary” band vowed to vengeance against Catholics. A terrifying story told in Trevor's supreme way.