Article: Comfort cult: on the honest unloveliness of William Trevor's world.(Critical Essay)

Discussed in this essay:

The Story of Lucy Gault, by William Trevor. Viking, 2002. 288 pages. $24.95. The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold. Little, Brown, 2002. 288 pages. $21.95.

By the middle of the second paragraph of The Story of Lucy Gault, everything that is going to happen in William Trevor's new novel has been set in motion by a single act of violence, a night of terrifying but (given the novel's setting, Ireland during the 1920s) unexceptional, even quotidian, mayhem and menace. As always, Trevor reports the most distressing incidents in the low-key, straightforward tone of a small-town newspaper reporting the profits of the annual church bazaar, ...

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