SOURCE: McGraw, Erin. “Telling Lives.” Georgia Review 51, no. 2 (summer 1997): 378-89.

In the following excerpt, McGraw praises the insight and steadiness of Trevor's narrative voice in After Rain.

The characters in William Trevor's After Rain inhabit a world about as far as can be imagined from Marie Sheppard Williams' emotionally tumultuous one. Trevor is known for elegance and restraint, for characters who make do with lives that have disappointed them, for understatement, implication, and spareness. Nevertheless, his stories aren't the prim-lipped affairs that such a description might suggest. Trevor's fiction centers on passion, lives held in the grip of enormous desires and compulsions. The work's power comes from its slow revelation to the reader that these passions are lifelong, not youthful aberrations. The fire of his characters' needs illuminates not only their delicately balanced psyches, but also their deep understanding and an even deeper, almost shocking acceptance of what...