SOURCE: "Irish Drift," in New Statesman and Society, Vol. 6, No. 267, August 27, 1993, pp. 40-1.

In the review below, Craig praises Excursions in the Real World as an insightful social commentary, but argues that it is not reveal enough about Trevor.

The real world as opposed to the world of fiction, that is; these enjoyable essays by William Trevor provide a series of glimpses into the novelist's past. He was born in Mitchelstown, Co Cork, in 1928, a Protestant in a Catholic culture, and without even the eclat that ownership of a "big house" might have conferred. His father was a bank clerk, and his childhood peripatetic: after Mitchelstown came Youghal and Skibbereen, and that was only the start.

The family curtains, he notes, "were altered to fit windows" all over the place—windows, moreover, looking out on a not entirely hospitable vista. De Valera's Ireland didn't provide much sense of...