Irish Eyes, Unsmiling

CHEATING AT CANASTA: Stories

By William Trevor

Viking. 232 pp. $24.95

There is terror and beauty in William Trevor's heartbreaking new collection, the fourth since his huge "Collected Stories" of 1992. In the tradition of Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain and James Joyce, Trevor is a master of delicacy and precision. He inhabits the skin of his lonely characters, mercilessly and compassionately revealing the moral and psychological complexities that lie beneath.

Although strewn with contemporary references to euros, supermarkets, mobile phones and the diminished role of religion, his world of rural Ireland and modest Dublin and London flats seems old-fashioned, as if left over from another time. The stories have the depth and dignity of Greek tragedies. Many, built around dark incidents -- an accident, a murder, a parent's death -- explore how people's lives are shaped and bound together by calamity.

In the disturbing "The Dressmaker's Child," an accident irrevocably changes the life of a young mechanic in a small Irish town. One night, as he drives Spanish tourists to see a supposedly miraculous statue, a child runs in front of his car. The youth and the dead child's mother become linked in a sinister relationship, an inextricable bond that resonates with fatalism.

What we are told in "Bravado" could encapsulate Trevor's recurring theme: "Nothing [is] unaffected." In this story, a young Dublin girl feels guilty for silently witnessing her boyfriend's assault of a boy who is found dead the next morning. She cannot flee the shadows of tragedy but remains "belonging where the thing had happened." In "Folie ¿ Deux," when two childhood friends meet by chance in Paris, the one who forgot a cruel childhood incident realizes that the other, who has been seriously affected by it, is the better person. The past is neither forgotten nor forgiven by an English woman in her 70s, who knows that her husband is having lunch for the last time with his former mistress in "Old Flame."

Much in these stories remains unsaid and unexplained. In "The Room," a man who has been acquitted of an unsolved murder and his wife never speak of whether he did it. And yet, whether he is guilty or not, they cannot escape the shadows of misfortune. An evil chill rushes through "An Afternoon," a tale about a lonely adolescent girl and a man she meets on a chat line; the story echoes the author's ominous novel "Felicia's Journey."

Even the gentle title story, a relief from the violence running through the collection, is suffused with melancholy. Sitting alone in Harry's Bar in Venice, a middle-aged Englishman mourns for his wife, who has Alzheimer's, and hearing an American couple quarreling, muses about what they are wasting. The story culminates in a moment of shame, but Trevor kindly tells us that "shame isn't bad. . . . Nor the humility that is its gift."

It is this compassion and generosity that make the stories so moving and at times uplifting. When a woman leaves her lover in "A Perfect Relationship," he is heartbroken and assumes there is another man. But after she returns and explains why she left, he reassures her that she made the right decision. And in "The Children," a widowed father realizes that his daughter's honoring of her late mother's memory counts more than his own happiness.

Trevor's historical novels "Fools of Fortune" and "The Story of Lucy Gault" brilliantly portray the tragedy of people caught in the web of Ireland's history. However, in one tale from this collection, "At Olivehill," the historical comparison seems a little strained. A widow, appalled that her sons are turning their farmland into a golf course, shuts herself in the house, outlandishly comparing her suffering with that of her ancestors who lived in the same house during the persecution inflicted by anti-Catholic laws.

With his characteristic economy and subtlety, Trevor moves between the physical landscape and the interior world of his characters. In "Faith," a Protestant clergyman in a desolate Irish parish has a sudden spiritual crisis. The visual details (he holds a shoe in his hand as he goes to bed; it clatters on the linoleum when it falls) make the clergyman's shock vivid and real. While he suffers in silence, his devout sister stoically bears up under a grave illness. But this bleak story, like many others in the collection, is lifted at the end: As the clergyman looks at his sister's face, finally at peace, he realizes that the mercy of her death is a miracle, "heaven enough, and more than angels." For all its darkness, the collection attests to the endurance of the human spirit.