Luscious Literature - Bit on The Side

By Frank Visco
Collegian Editor
March 19, 2008

William Trevor is regularly regarded as the best living writer of short stories in English. As a result, it may come as no surprise that Trevor’s A Bit on the Side, a collection of a dozen short stories, is an engrossing and thoughtprovoking read.

While each of the 12 stories are not unheralded successes, there is no denying that Trevor has a strong sense for the characteristics, mannerisms, observations and little moments that invoke humanity out of paper and words. As the title suggests, many of the stories deal with adultery, but each one goes far beyond marital infidelity to make bigger statements, usually concerning loneliness and regret.

Many of Trevor’s characters are middle-aged and hopeless, lonely souls who live out routines of emptiness due to regret over decayed relationships or a lack of meaningful relationships. In “Sitting with the Dead,” a widow (Emily) spends an evening with two nuns who attempt to comfort her after her husband’s death, a death that has freed Emily from a life full of isolated fear. Upon leaving, one of the old nuns comments to the other, “I’d say, myself, it was the dead we were sitting with,” putting a new spin on the contrasts between the living and the dead that Trevor’s fellow Irishman James Joyce explored in his masterpiece “The Dead.”

In several of his other stories, Trevor paints different scenarios concerning couples, with differing shades of loneliness and remorse. In the best of these, “An Evening Out” a man and a woman exploit one another on a blind date—the man getting a free meal, the woman some company. Meanwhile, in “On the Streets” a woman is stalked by her confused and potentially violent ex-husband. In the book’s title piece, “A Bit on the Side,” a middle-aged accountant ends a long-held affair so that the woman he loves won’t be regarded as his bit on the side. Each of these stories is emotionally wrenching in its own right, but in each one Trevor affords his characters the tiniest bit of solace.

While Trevor has a penchant for concentrating on couples in flux, he excels at putting a spin on that formula. In the book’s strongest work, “Solitude,” Trevor shows another dysfunctional marriage, but this time through the eyes of a daughter who, at the age of seven, attacked her mother’s lover and, at 53, tells the story to strangers hoping to find someone who’s not horrified by it. The story is a tour de force, perfectly capturing the tone of his character at three times in her life (seven, 17, and 53).

Trevor’s stories are highlighted by his words and shifting points of view. His highly visual prose, at times simple and others complex, always work to bring the reader into the story and invoke the character’s emotions. More noticeable is Trevor’s fondness for a shifting point of view. Seven of the 12 stories have significant point of view shifts, and he usually pulls off this difficult task with excellent results. In stories concerning couples( such as “An Evening Out,” “Sacred Statues,” “Big Bucks,” “On the Streets” and “A Bit on the Side”) this technique works wonderfully. Starting out separately but eventually overlapping, this shift in viewpoints works to more fully round out the characters by showing us their internal thoughts and perceptions of one another. In other works, specifically “Traditions” and “Justina’s Priest,” the technique is only marginally successful. Although both stories are somewhat effective, they also lack focus, and as a result, they come across as the weakest efforts in the book.

In the book’s title story, the couple takes comfort in the fact that they never wasted a moment of their love “by sitting in the silence of a dark cinema, sleeping through the handful of nights they’d spent together in her flat ... [or] through lovers’ quarrels.” Similarly, I can say in confidence that spending an evening or two with William Trevor’s A Bit on the Side will not be a waste of anyone’s time, but rather a celebration of the short story form at its best.

viscof1@lasalle.edu