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A review by bonnieg
The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor
4.0
I have had conversations IRL and here on GR about not liking to feel manipulated by writers. I hate being told how I am supposed to feel. Sometimes people do not seem to understand what I am talking about. For those people I will say that William Trevor is the sine qua non of non-manipulative writers. I am awed both by Trevor's facility and economy with words. A reader needs to really pay attention when reading Trevor because it is easy to completely miss shattering events. The loss of home, life, children, dignity, peace happen in the course of a few sentences, and those events are conveyed with no more fanfare than is given a description of a tea towel laid upon a bush to dry. One example "For a moment that night he was glad they had tidied up the graves. Later he was aware of pain. It did not wake him." That is it, the whole death scene . (Not a spoiler, the story takes place over the course of 70 years so people die, that is just one of them). Do with it what you will. For me, I had all sorts of feeling about that death, complicated conflicting feelings, and every feeling was mine and came from the relationship Trevor built between me and the character.
I have read many of Trevor's short stories, but this is my first of his novels. Though this is wonderful and you should read it, I have liked Trevor's short stories a good deal more than I liked this. I tried to identify why I like the short stories more, and I have two theories. The first is that it is not a matter of form, but rather of Trevor being an old man when he wrote this. His standard feeling of melancholy, which has pervaded all the work I have read, is notched up from melancholy to frustration at his obsolescence and the obsolescence of his characters. My second theory is that it is not Trevor's frustration but my own that is invading the reading experience. What comes off as characters' equanimity in the stories I have read feels like the characters' plodding inertia in this novel. Is that because the increased length means I am reading about a litany of incomprehensibly terrible choices and non-choices rather than just a couple? Is this because the characters in this book just work harder to avoid conflict (thereby creating conflict) than those on earlier works? Damned if I know. Whatever the reason I was realllllly frustrated by people not doing anything, of running from understanding or resolution as fast as they could. That is why this is a 4-star rather than a 5-star for me. When people talk the language is peppered with "I can't not" and other phrases that imply an intense desire to not act, to not feel. I don't want to spoil the book so I won't say more, but I will say the central event in the book could have been resolved simply through letting anyone in the world know where characters were living. This is something that pretty much anyone with any connections (and these people had connections), even people with depression and/or PTSD, would do. A large property is left in the care of caretakers, and yet for a lifetime the property owners do not contact the caretakers or even provide their contact information in case of emergency. There is a passing reference at the very end of the book to this now old person seeing people walk down the streets with their phones, and to her hearing about the internet and having no idea what that meant, and maybe that is my problem here. Having lived so long in this age I cannot get my mind around people disappearing -- disappearing is something that is pretty hard to do these days. Maybe this frustration is entirely my fault. In any event, it does not at all ruin the read, it just changes it.
One more note, when I read this the song Delta Dawn kept playing in my head. While I really like music, I have never been much of a Helen Reddy fangirl, but that totally came up. This vision of a girl, then a woman, caught up by the regrets of rejecting love and spending her days waiting for something unattainable while wearing the old abandoned dresses of her old abandoning mother just got me there. I need to start reading more books that make me think of action like Party in the USA or Hot in Here, or even Lust for Life.
I have read many of Trevor's short stories, but this is my first of his novels. Though this is wonderful and you should read it, I have liked Trevor's short stories a good deal more than I liked this. I tried to identify why I like the short stories more, and I have two theories. The first is that it is not a matter of form, but rather of Trevor being an old man when he wrote this. His standard feeling of melancholy, which has pervaded all the work I have read, is notched up from melancholy to frustration at his obsolescence and the obsolescence of his characters. My second theory is that it is not Trevor's frustration but my own that is invading the reading experience. What comes off as characters' equanimity in the stories I have read feels like the characters' plodding inertia in this novel. Is that because the increased length means I am reading about a litany of incomprehensibly terrible choices and non-choices rather than just a couple? Is this because the characters in this book just work harder to avoid conflict (thereby creating conflict) than those on earlier works? Damned if I know. Whatever the reason I was realllllly frustrated by people not doing anything, of running from understanding or resolution as fast as they could. That is why this is a 4-star rather than a 5-star for me. When people talk the language is peppered with "I can't not" and other phrases that imply an intense desire to not act, to not feel. I don't want to spoil the book so I won't say more, but I will say the central event in the book could have been resolved simply through letting anyone in the world know where characters were living. This is something that pretty much anyone with any connections (and these people had connections), even people with depression and/or PTSD, would do. A large property is left in the care of caretakers, and yet for a lifetime the property owners do not contact the caretakers or even provide their contact information in case of emergency. There is a passing reference at the very end of the book to this now old person seeing people walk down the streets with their phones, and to her hearing about the internet and having no idea what that meant, and maybe that is my problem here. Having lived so long in this age I cannot get my mind around people disappearing -- disappearing is something that is pretty hard to do these days. Maybe this frustration is entirely my fault. In any event, it does not at all ruin the read, it just changes it.
One more note, when I read this the song Delta Dawn kept playing in my head. While I really like music, I have never been much of a Helen Reddy fangirl, but that totally came up. This vision of a girl, then a woman, caught up by the regrets of rejecting love and spending her days waiting for something unattainable while wearing the old abandoned dresses of her old abandoning mother just got me there. I need to start reading more books that make me think of action like Party in the USA or Hot in Here, or even Lust for Life.