BOOK REVIEW / MEMOIR : Autobiography That Goes Beyond Reality : EXCURSIONS IN THE REAL WORLD: Memoirs, <i> by William Trevor</i> , Alfred A. Knopf; $23, 201 pages

The short stories for which William Trevor is best known, and his novels and novellas, which I find even more remarkable, possess a reality as jolting as a burst tire.

Reality is not the things Trevor sees but what he sees through them. When he invents his characters, the point is not their features and actions, or even their thoughts and emotions--accomplished as they are--but what lies beyond.

The same is true of his landscapes, whose grasses or bare hills seem to stand for something else. Call it soul, as in Chekhov, to whom a few other writers are tediously--and Trevor quite appropriately--compared.

“Excursions in the Real World” makes a suspiciously ironic title for these bits of autobiography and travel sketches. Curiously--and significantly--it is those with the least detail and elaboration, those that do more implying than recounting, that give us the greatest sense of reality.

Perhaps it is unfair. From a journalist or a lesser writer, the facts would do fine, but from Trevor we need more. We know the lookout is up there; unless he gives us a view beyond the one we get here below, we may feel he is inventing, or at least concealing.

Thus, there are two pieces that convey the decrepit, damped-down feel of an out-of-date or out-of-season beach resort. One of them centers on a lavish seaside hotel in the winter, patronized by a few lonely habitues and a convention of car-battery salesmen.

There is plenty of ironic detail and observation, yet it feels like a piece of writing, something done for an occasion--a magazine or newspaper commission, perhaps--rather than a need. By contrast there is a visit to Youghal, a resort in County Cork, Ireland, where Trevor spent several early years. It is a featureless place and, in a few plain yet curiously elusive scenes and a phrase--”a town that no one dislikes”--Trevor captures not only the place, but a bit of childhood’s bareness.

He takes the Orient Express. He writes in the sophisticated-picturesque mode--something like the strained quality of Paul Theroux’s traveling--except for a moment when he shares a drink with an alcoholic abdominal surgeon.

Aren’t shaky hands a problem? Trevor asks. They would be for an eye surgeon, the man explains, but not for a brain surgeon or for him. “The brain’s quite large, you know. The stomach’s enormous, people don’t realize.”

One of Trevor’s fictional doors opens for a moment in a piece that otherwise feels like experience experienced for the purpose of writing about it. A like sense of commissioned sensibility comes from fairly ordinary pieces about New York; San Francisco; Venice, Italy; and, surprisingly, Dublin.

There are, to be sure, some engaging anecdotes and sketches. There is the blithe, egg-shaped and extremely shrewd Marchant Smith, who hired Trevor as an advertising trainee after he had failed the writing test at a larger firm. Marchant devised the “Tell me, doctor” series of ads for a pharmaceutical firm; after he died, someone suggested inscribing the line on his tombstone.

The Sylvia Plath-Ted Hughes story gets another perspective in a sketch of Assia, the charming Russian-Jewish emigre who floated in London literary circles and replaced Plath in Hughes’ life. Trevor was a friend; he tells of a shaky Assia having a drink with him after she and Hughes broke up, and confessing through a “lavish smile” that she felt afraid. Weeks later, taking Plath’s place once more, she killed herself and her small son in a gas oven.

There are pleasant but unremarkable sketches of life at boarding school, first as a student and later as a teacher. There is a much stronger portrait of his parents’ marriage, which gradually froze over.

“Both laughed a lot but differently, and not in each other’s company,” Trevor writes, and tells us that they separated after the children grew up and they never saw each other again. It is vivid and desolating, but it lacks the sense of seeing beyond the story that can be found in so much of Trevor’s fiction.

We get that sense in “The Strand,” a seemingly artless description of a bit of beach he used to walk on, of a priest who used to strip and swim naked from it, of an abandoned house that belonged to an Englishman who suddenly went away. It ends with Trevor’s stripped-down, laconic eloquence:

“There is no nostalgia here, only remembering facts--and the point that passing time has made: the strand is still the strand, taking change and another set of mores in its stride, as people and houses cannot. While you walk its length, there is something comforting in that.”