SOURCE: "The Rest is Silence': Secrets in Some William Trevor Stories," in New Irish Writing: Essays in Memory of Raymond J. Porter, edited by James D. Brophy and Eamon Grennan, Twayne Publishers, 1989, pp. 35-53.

Rhodes is an American educator and literary critic with a special interest in Irish literature. In the following excerpt, he explores the theme of secrecy in Trevor's stories, asserting that it is "a means of directing our attention to his most important fictional concern: the mystery of human personality, behind which may also preside some assumptions, conscious or otherwise, about dimensions of the Irish personality. "

Prior to the 1986 collection The News from Ireland and Other Stories, William Trevor had published five collections of short stories. The first collection (1967) contained a single Irish story, "Miss Smith." The four succeeding volumes had an average of four Irish stories each. In News, seven of the twelve are...