The road to humility

LITERATURE will outpace us, like the cockroaches. After all the tinkering is done, the biggering and bettering, the rebuilding and ruining, we will have only books like William Trevor's new collection, "Cheating at Canasta," to remind us how serious, noble, painful and happy human life once was. Trevor's stories -- so like James Joyce's and Alice Munro's -- preserve something of the scale of human life. Emotions fit the dramas they're attached to; gestures seem appropriate, and there is time to notice them. The feelings of children matter, the regrets of husbands, the loneliness of women. Every story has its victim, but the crime is forgotten somewhere along the line because, well, we are only human.

Human, humility. The old husband in "Cheating at Canasta's" title story, sitting in a restaurant in Venice to fulfill a promise he once made to his late wife, imagines her voice, telling him: "Shame isn't bad. . . . Nor the humility that is its gift." There is much shame in the 12 stories here, as well as its cousins: regret, guilt, suspicion, deception. These states color every room, every landscape. "A wasteland, it seemed like where she walked, made so not by itself but by her mood," thinks Katherine, a character in "The Room" who is caught between a relationship with a man who has just gone back to his wife and the suspicion that her husband, Phair, may have killed the woman with whom he had an affair many years back. A room filled with light and happiness one day, emptied of the human will to make it beautiful, looks gray and dingy the next. (Exhausting, this responsibility we bear to keep things beautiful and happy.)

In the midst of all this ordinariness, nothing is received, nothing expected. Trevor loves his details, fastens on them, but he loves mystery more. You can, like his characters, try very hard to locate yourself at the center of your own life, using details like status, position, religion and ancestral land, but in the end, mystery will out. Cahal, a bumbling 19-year-old in "The Dressmaker's Child," hits the small child of the story's title -- who is fond of running into the road and whose mother is neglectful -- with his car and kills her. Thinking no one has seen the accident, he drives on. His life becomes unbearable. The key to his healing, his journey's specific DNA, is not what you would expect.