SOURCE: Oates, Joyce Carol. “On Small Farms from Cork to Cavan.” Times Literary Supplement (29 September 2000): 22-3.

In the following favorable review of The Hill Bachelors, Oates characterizes the main thematic concerns of Trevor's short fiction.

Twentieth-century Irish literature has been a phenomenon. No more ambitious and original novels than James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake have been written in any language, and it might be claimed that Ulysses is the greatest novel in the English language. In poetry, William Butler Yeats is surely the greatest poet of the century writing in English. In drama, John Millington Synge and Sean O'Casey are major world playwrights. (And there is Samuel Beckett, sui generis, writing in French but Irish-born and arguably, in the cadences of his unique voice, never other than “Irish”.) Yet it would seem that the short story is the...