Having read approximately 80 Collected stories at this point, I feel safe in making the following broad statement: William Trevor is not funny. This is not to say he’s humorless—Trevor’s prose has that ironic bounce that marks most good prose, from Tolstoy to Jenny Offill. It is a long-held position of mine that it’s nearly impossible for a completely humorless writer to be good. One’s mind immediately goes to the po-faced Germanic/Nordic writers for an example, someone like Hesse, maybe. But even Karl Ove Knausgaard, a writer capable of spending thirty pages describing the cleaning of a bathroom in unadorned, plodding sentences, has a wry comic aspect to his work; arguably, of course, describing a bathroom cleanup in minute detail is itself very funny.
But while Trevor’s calm, observational writing can be droll, even witty, the stories themselves are not funny. Trevor’s register is, needless to say, a tragic one, and not the kind of tragedy that finds drama in comic pathos. As a counterexample, Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, like Trevor’s, are full of alienated misfit loners and losers, castaways from society’s economic and sexual Main Street. But O’Connor is funny—funny in her terrible/terrifying plots and plot turns, funny in her dialogue and interiority, and funny (and horribly cruel) in her portrayal of human life lived at the fringes. Trevor is on one level too gentle and genteel to cast his characters, per Mel Brooks, directly into an open sewer for yucks; on another level, he is too exquisitely sensitive a torturer to get some of the laughs O’Connor gets via coarse comic masterstrokes (like having a character’s leg stolen).
A rare exception in this book is the very funny (and awfully sad) “A Trinity.” The story concerns Keith and Dawne (the names themselves are unusually satirical, even Martin Amis-esque). Keith and Dawne are a hapless married pair of borderline defectives who live with an elderly man named Uncle above his newspaper shop. Dawne works for Uncle, and she and Keith take care of the old man, and he in his own way takes care of them: ”A Trinity” begins with Uncle decreeing it time they have a holiday and paying for them to book a trip to Venice. But as often happens with Keith and Dawne, things go awry—they find themselves in Switzerland rather than Venice, booked into a hotel with a tourist group of old-age pensioners. Despite Keith’s best, outraged efforts, the tour guide Mrs. Franks, and the travel company back in Croydon, are unable to rectify the situation, and Keith and Dawne must make the best of their inadvertent alpine vacation.
The portrait of these two ineffectually trying to make someone, anyone, understand what has happened, is unusually funny for Trevor. Keith is an especially tragicomic figure, a small man who correctly suspects no one respects him, a dimwit with an unfortunate habit of feigning confidence with his marginally more competent partner, Dawne. One of the funniest paragraphs in all of Trevor’s oeuvre details the various financial mishaps that led to Dawne and Keiths’ entanglement with and dependency upon Uncle:
It was not the first time that Keith and Dawne had suffered in this way: they were familiar with defeat. There’d been the time, a couple of years after their marriage, when Keith had got into debt through purchasing materials for making ships in bottles; earlier—before they’d even met—there was the occasion when the Lamb and Flag had had to let Dawne go because she’d taken tips even though the rules categorically forbade it. Once, Keith had sawn through the wrong water pipe and the landlords had come along with a bill for nearly two hundred pounds when the ceiling of the flat below collapsed. It was Uncle who had given Dawne a job in his shop after the Lamb and Flag episode and who put them on their feet by paying off the arrears of the handicraft debt.
The Lamb and Flag episode, the handicraft debt—this is funny stuff. But, of course, this is awfully sad, as well, as is the revelation, at the end, that they are living with Uncle and enduring his mean-spirited and mocking charity in hopes that he will die and leave them his money. It is a match made in Hell: the incompetents supported by and hoping for a bequest from a man who needs their physical help as well as people to feel superior to. The story is especially effective in its conclusory revelation of Keith and Dawne’s conspiracy: their grim determination to stay on with this mean old man is likely, in a life full of mistakes, to be the final, crowning error.
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