William Trevor's Cheating at Canasta (2007): Cautionary Tales for Contemporary Ireland

Although William Trevor's fiction about Ireland and the Irish has won him international acclaim, he has in fact lived outside of Ireland since the 1950s, when, like many young Irish, he left for economic reasons. Trevor's earliest fiction was informed by his perspective as an unwilling expatriate confronting an alien culture, but since the 1960s he increasingly has turned to his native Ireland as a setting. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Ireland Trevor has depicted in recent years is frequently the country of his youth. Even when his fiction is not expressly set in the mid-twentieth century, the flavors of the past permeate his prose, with little evidence of the recent prosperity, technological change, and double-barreled economic and cultural barrage of the European Union and the United States. In 1999, Dolores MacKenna observed that though Trevor's Ireland is still "recognisable," it is a place "viewed from a backward glance."¹ When filmmaker Atom Egoyan adapted Trevor's 1994 novel Felicia's Journey, he justified his considerable liberties with the text by asserting that the Ireland Felicia inhabits no longer exists: "Ireland is very prosperous and a lot of towns are tarted up for the tourist industry."² Trevor himself has declared, however, that his daily reading of the Irish Times, listening to RTÉ, and periodic visits keep him attuned to Ireland.

Dublin's clogged streets of cell phone-wielding pedestrians, the explosion of new construction throughout Ireland, and the commodification of the alleged "Celtic" in dance extravaganzas and New Age music are little in evidence in Trevor's fiction—but Trevor does give voice to the seismic cultural changes Ireland has undergone in recent years: an increasingly secularized society, dizzying material wealth for some, and a people contemplating their individual and national identity in a sometimes bewildering new order. In his most recent collections of short stories, A Bit on the Side (2004) and Cheating at Canasta (2007), Trevor unveils his own new Ireland—not the shiny, new-minted face of the tourism web site, but rather, a palimpsest through whose surface the past still seeps.

Since the 1960s, when Ireland first became a regular setting for Trevor's fiction, critics have noted his attunement to the impact of social and political upheaval upon everyday life. Whether Trevor takes as his backdrop the Dublin of his university days, the provincial Ireland of his childhood, the historic past of the Famine, the Anglo-Irish War, the Irish Civil War, or recent transformations in Irish religious, economic, and cultural life, he is able to inhabit his characters' times and psyches credibly.³ His most recent stories, written in the wake of the Celtic Tiger and the Good Friday Agreement, often follow undramatic plot lines and opt instead for, as Emily Dickinson put it, "eternal difference, / Where the meanings are—. "His characters live in an Ireland often grown alien to them, not because of political violence or historical trauma, but because of changing mores, increasing secularization, and eroding authority.

A number of the stories in A Bit on the Side (2004) are set in Ireland; in these stories, Trevor gives subtle twists to familiar Irish themes of emigration, religion, and social division. In "Big Bucks," a young woman chooses not to emigrate to the United States, despite her awareness that staying in her small Irish town offers limited economic opportunities, because her fiancé's new life of low-paying work, cultural anonymity, and pursuit of the elusive green card offers even bleaker prospects. The title character in "Justina's Priest" is shaken to the core by his church's decline, yet remains trapped in lonely silence, and clings to the hope that he can at least preserve the innocence of a mentally challenged parishioner. In "Sitting With the Dead," the Geraghty sisters, whose apparent piety and attendance upon the sick and bereaved at first glance see manachronistic, in fact possess a shrewd psychological insight into a new widow's life of quiet desperation. And in "Sacred Statues," a Catholic sculptor's well-meaning English Protestant neighbor and patron urges him to...