The road to humility

LITERATURE will outpace us, like the cockroaches. After all the tinkering is done, the biggering and bettering, the rebuilding and ruining, we will have only books like William Trevor’s new collection, “Cheating at Canasta,” to remind us how serious, noble, painful and happy human life once was. Trevor’s stories -- so like James Joyce’s and Alice Munro’s -- preserve something of the scale of human life. Emotions fit the dramas they’re attached to; gestures seem appropriate, and there is time to notice them. The feelings of children matter, the regrets of husbands, the loneliness of women. Every story has its victim, but the crime is forgotten somewhere along the line because, well, we are only human.

Human, humility. The old husband in “Cheating at Canasta’s” title story, sitting in a restaurant in Venice to fulfill a promise he once made to his late wife, imagines her voice, telling him: “Shame isn’t bad. . . . Nor the humility that is its gift.” There is much shame in the 12 stories here, as well as its cousins: regret, guilt, suspicion, deception. These states color every room, every landscape. “A wasteland, it seemed like where she walked, made so not by itself but by her mood,” thinks Katherine, a character in “The Room” who is caught between a relationship with a man who has just gone back to his wife and the suspicion that her husband, Phair, may have killed the woman with whom he had an affair many years back. A room filled with light and happiness one day, emptied of the human will to make it beautiful, looks gray and dingy the next. (Exhausting, this responsibility we bear to keep things beautiful and happy.)

In the midst of all this ordinariness, nothing is received, nothing expected. Trevor loves his details, fastens on them, but he loves mystery more. You can, like his characters, try very hard to locate yourself at the center of your own life, using details like status, position, religion and ancestral land, but in the end, mystery will out. Cahal, a bumbling 19-year-old in “The Dressmaker’s Child,” hits the small child of the story’s title -- who is fond of running into the road and whose mother is neglectful -- with his car and kills her. Thinking no one has seen the accident, he drives on. His life becomes unbearable. The key to his healing, his journey’s specific DNA, is not what you would expect.

In “An Afternoon,” 15-year-old Jasmin meets Clive, a 29-year-old with whom she has been chatting online. Ominous, ominous; we are poised for judgment. And yet, there is none forthcoming. In its place, Trevor offers some mysterious form of love, love in one of its myriad disguises. A similar dynamic motivates “Men of Ireland,” in which a man named Prunty returns home after 23 years away. Homeless and begging, he ends up at the vicarage of a priest, whom he accuses of having molested him when he was an altar boy. Trevor is far too clever to tell us who is guilty. Why point the finger at mere humans? That would be letting poverty and power off the hook.

Sometimes, in this collection more than any of his others, Trevor’s love of mystery causes strange locutions and inscrutable vagaries. “Six months was the length of an affair,” he writes in “The Room,” “that took place because something else was wrong: knowing more about all this than Katherine did, the man she met in the afternoons said that.” Or: “He shook his head and the name was still unfamiliar to him when she told him why it might not have been.” The phrasing here is willfully passive, as if the author wants to test our powers of attention, throw us off track. In some stories, this works beautifully, not unlike the sourceless light of the Hudson River painters. In others -- particularly “Old Flame” and “At Olivehill” -- it leaves us flailing for connection, meaning, a place to land. (Still, one can’t help but admire Trevor’s obvious immunity from American editors, who rarely let obscurity, whether in service of mystery or experiment, go unparsed.)

In “Faith,” Bartholomew, a priest, has a revelation, following a moment of impatience “with the embroidery and frills that dressed the simplicity of truth with invasive, sentimental stories that somehow made faith easier, the hymns he hated. For Bartholomew, the mystery that was the source of all spiritual belief, present through catastrophe and plague and evil, was a strength now too, and more than it had ever been.” Bartholomew’s lost faith is replaced by courage, by love and humility. He is able to comfort his sister on her deathbed. “Heaven enough,” he thinks looking at her peaceful face, “and more than angels.”

Trevor, who turns 80 next year, has written 13 novels, two novellas, 12 collections of stories, a play, two works of nonfiction and a children’s book. He has dedicated his life to this art form. Perhaps that’s why “Cheating at Canasta” has a backward-looking feel to it, gentle but firm, even in stories like “Bravado” and “The Dressmaker’s Child,” where the characters are not yet 20 and must learn humility the hard way. Writers sometimes slip us shortcuts on the sly. Best consider Trevor’s.

--

susan.reynolds@latimes.com