Trevor's short fiction has been compared to that of James Joyce's
Dubliners (1914). Like Joyce, Trevor often ends his stories with an epiphany, and both writers share the view that one can write well about Ireland only after leaving it. Trevor also has been compared to Elizabeth Bowen, both for their shared insights into the lives of the Anglo-Irish and their psychological exploration of character that takes precedence over plot.
Although Trevor's style and plot development are traditional rather than experimental, his fiction reveals him as a shrewd observer of events of his time, or, as he calls himself, an eavesdropper on conversations and situations. His early stories explore the worlds of the elderly, the eccentric, and society's misfits. The stories of his middle period reflect the social turmoil of Britain in the 1960s and 1970s. Forced out of their constricted environments, Trevor's characters must cope with such social phenomena as the effects of drugs and alcohol on themselves and others, the new sexual freedom and the changes it brings to marriage, the behavior of a generation of adolescents unleashed from adult supervision and loosed on society, and the disturbance of those who try in vain to re-create an idealized happiness of the past.
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