SOURCE: Lasdun, James. “A Genius for Misery.” Times Literary Supplement (27 September 1996): 23.

In the following review, Lasdun surveys the strengths and weaknesses of Trevor's short fiction, deeming the stories comprising After Rain as some of the author's best work.

Leverage is all; as in the commodities trade, so in the short story. Maximum disturbance (change, revelation) achieved with minimum means. Often regarded as a poor relation of the novel, the form has, in fact, more in common with the lyric poem, requiring the same taut calibration of effect, the same double-duty from each of its parts—that they be vividly realized in themselves; that they play a precise, energizing role in the patterning of the whole—and showing the same lack of tolerance for digression, slowness or purely expository information.

How to get credible purchase on enough of human life to be compelling, in a space small enough for...