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Article: Comfort cult: on the honest unloveliness of William Trevor's world.(Critical Essay)
- Article from:
- Harper's Magazine
- Article date:
- December 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Harper's Magazine Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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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, ...