William Trevor's characters would be perfectly content to lead decorous, uneventful lives. They work in shops or offices, attend bridge socials and lawn parties, quietly raise quiet families in London or the Irish countryside. Yet calm eludes them. Unbidden and inevitable as physics or original sin, the past catches them up, impartial History tracing out consequences. Each of the dozen stories in Beyond the Pale, Trevor's fifth collection, gauges some repercussion of past on present. Small ones, mostly—remembered indiscretions, hints of family secrets—or larger ones muffled by distance, specifically the continuing war in Ireland. As brute facts intrude, Trevor's characters struggle to stay unruffled, because in their daily round civility equals sanity. They're forced to shift their internal balance of acceptance, forgetfulness, apology, and rationalization. Trevor at his best neither glorifies nor minimizes the struggle; without judging, he illuminates it life-sized.

The stories register flickers of...