SOURCE: "Short Satisfactions," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXVII, No. 8, May 17, 1990, pp. 38-9.

In the following review Towers argues that while some of the stories in Family Sins are skillfully told, the collection does not measure up to Trevor's earlier work.

Readers of William Trevor's earlier story collections, six in all, will find in Family Sins, as before, that the Irish settings—mucky farms, shabby genteel boarding houses, schools, convents, hotel barrooms where more than a few drinks are taken—are coolly but sympathetically observed. So are his characters—foolish, blustering, guilty, touching in their various predicaments.

In "The Third Party," Boland, who runs a small-town bakery, meets Lairdman, who is in the timber business, in the bar of Buswell's Hotel in Dublin. Boland recognizes him as someone who had attended the same school and remembers that Lairdman had once had his head held down...