A Bit on the Side: Stories
Selected Book Details
- Hardcover
- Edition: First Edition
- Author: William Trevor
- Publisher: Viking Adult
- Release Date: September 2004
- ISBN-10: 067003343X
- ISBN-13: 9780670033430
- List Price: $24.95
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryWilliam Trevor is truly a Chekhov for our age, and a new collection of stories from him is always a cause for celebration. In these twelve stories, a waiter divulges his shocking life of crime to his ex-wife; a woman repeats the story of her parents’ unstable marriage after a horrible tragedy; a schoolgirl regrets gossiping about the cuckolded man who tutors her; and, in the volume’s title story, a middle-age accountant offers his reasons for ending a love affair. At the heart of this stunning collection is Trevor’s characteristic tenderness and unflinching eye for both the humanizing and dehumanizing aspects of modern urban and rural life. |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
The end of the affair, the beginning of a new life
Rating:
In William Trevor's short stories, sometimes the end is just the beginning. The title stories of the collection "A Bit on The Side" ends just with a note of hope to something that, at first, sound hopeless, but, as the last lines reveals it is just the beginning of another cycle in the life of the characters. That is how Trevor's stories are - just about changes that come to our lives.
In this collection, his 11th, lives are changed by what is called `the fragility of love'. Trevor is always dealing with the delicacy, his characters survive the pain and the loss, but this a complex process. His prose is capable of compressing the arc of a life in a couple of well observed sentences.
"A Bit on the Side" is one of Trevor's best collections. Here readers can find all the best qualities of short prose, his chekovian realism and his poetry shining through the veil of everyday ordinary lives.
"Chronicler of Interiority"
Rating:
Trevor, as usual, writes stories marked first of all by a startling realism of surface. The sights, sounds, smells of the external world are precisely captured and rendered. We see for instance the central female character of "A Bit On The Side" pecking away at a plastic wrapped salad from a nearby Pret a Manger, while her male companion eats a sandwich smelling faintly of marmite with lettuce leaves overhanging its edges. What we know, but the male companion can't, is that the woman continuing to eat her salad actually has no appetite for it. In such a minor detail lies the open sesame to Trevor's art. He takes the reader on a journey into the interior lives of his forlorn characters, showing us that what they reveal to others even in minor matters may be often less than the truth or even the opposite of it. In "Sitting With The Dead," a second example, the central figure Emily tells the visiting Legion of Mary sisters a lot but finally far less about her valuation of her late husband than we the readers are allowed to know. Trevor consistently exposes to his readers, then, that gap which renders people frequently opaque to one another and is in major matters at the core of their ultimate oddity, even mysteriousness. His is artistic fiction of the highest order.
Trevor's Unnerving Bits and Pieces
Rating:
William Trevor is surely one of the most talented current writers of fiction, and a remarkable master of the short story form. And we find him at his best in "A Bit On the Side." His work is subtle, disquieting, unnerving, with a distinct tendency to transmute the fictional world he's constructing, that you thought you understood, into something quite different: and he does it right before your very eyes. Some of these stories are set in the United Kingdom, some in Ireland, as befits the work of an Irishman resident in the U.K.; a man never quite at home anywhere.
He gives us a woman waiting at a theater bar for a blind date she's going to regret meeting; a private midlands boys'school where nothing is as it should be; a hotel waiter who takes his job way too seriously.
And in his title story,of which we have certain expectations based on the world as we know it: well, he just turns them upside down. His people are sometimes kinder than you might expect, often nastier, but seldom what you thought you were getting.
Decent, if forgettable, stories
Rating: 
Perhaps mine is a case of mismanaged expectations, but I found this collection to be a merely average entry in the literary short story genre. The prose is excellent, of course, and some of the stories stand out, but most of them fail to impress, especially at their endings, which, almost without exception, are marked by forced poetry and profundity, as if Trevor felt that the story didn't hold well enough together on its own and needed an expository coda.
Overall, good but not great. Try some of his other stuff.
Tinkering with Secrets and Other Hidden Things
Rating:
William Trevor guides us through streets and dank parlors and weakly lighted public places where his characters guard or choose to unravel those darker aspects of living he understands so well. In A BIT ON THE SIDE Trevor has written twelve short stories that could have been written by no one else. His prodigious gifts as a writer make him privy to the musings we all hold in private, knowing that voicing them would doubtless find misunderstanding glances in parting eyes of the people in retreat from our confessions.
Where does Trevor find these thoughts, much less these subtly drawn characters? In lonely corner tables in pubs, in the shy fears of wives of husbands departed in body or in spirit, in expectations of young Irish girls dreaming of better lives in America, or of poor pregnant mothers willing to offer their incipient child for adoption to spare their husband's jobless humiliation?
While William Trevor is a demanding author, one who graces his stories with subtle time lapses or changes that require the reader to be on the alert for the assured nuances of his craft, he is never less than amazing in his ability to paint portraits of people so odd in their ordinariness that ending a short story does not allow us to leave them alone. This is writing of the highest order - challenging, enriching, plangently longing, unforgettable. These are twelve treasures. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, February 2005
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