William Trevor makes me cry

It is not often I even finish a story in the NewYorker these days, but this story , Bravado, by William Trevor, in the Jan 15th issue of the New Yorker, is just extraordinarily good.

I won't spoil it, but will just say that he has an astonishing talent for easing you into a story gently, circling around, without letting on who the main character is until half way through. His writing is so sure and every word so right that you feel utterly confident that it will all be tied together perfectly, and - generally - painfully.

While he appears to be describing ordinary people and an ordinary town, he also manages to insinuate an undercurrent of threat and un-ease. Perhaps this shouldn't suprise me, it is the small acts of violence that are often more shocking than the grandiose ones. And perhaps I automatically read these themes into the story because I know that Trevor is not a happy-endings kind of guy. But I think this story is worthy of discussion, apparently gentle, not employing fancy words or seemingly striving for any great moral, yet at the end I wanted to weep.


It's fifteen minutes later and I still want to weep.

That's talent.