But these are exceptions. For instance, it might seem unlikely for the faintly brutish garage assistant in “The Dressmaker’s Child” to occupy any of our territory. Particularly when he runs over a backward child who plays a game of jumping out at passing cars. Yet when the child’s weirdly reclusive mother begins a half-vindictive, half-erotic pursuit, it is like seeing a swimmer dragged coldly down by a manta ray.  “An Afternoon” is even more unlikely. The teenage Jasmin, whose mother neglects her for the men she brings home, is picked up by the 30-ish Clive, who gives her a tacky bracelet, warms her with loving flattery and is about to take her home when his aunt, screaming, tracks him down. The pedophile weeps and flees. Jasmin shuts herself in her room and caresses the bracelet. Astonishingly, along with a nightmare averted, Mr. Trevor manages to leave us with Jasmin’s grief over an idyll snatched away and even (even!) with the pedophile’s humiliated tears.  Relatively marginal pieces, these two, yet samples of Mr. Trevor’s lifelong refusal to reduce life to an either-or. Many more show him at his golden best. The classic short story of modern times (before the postmodern contemporary) favored epiphanies with downticks. A Trevor story displays, if not precisely an uptick, a kind of relenting. Like God in the Spanish proverb, he squeezes but he doesn’t choke.  “Men of Ireland” features Prunty, a thoroughly bad lot, who fled his little Irish town after a string of youthful delinquencies and now, years later, hitchhikes back. (The trip is fine picaresque: He steals a rich drunk’s shoes and turns an amiable truck driver stone silent by asking for a handout.) The return is for the purpose of shaking down an old priest whose Mass he had served.  Prunty reminds Father Meade that he had once offered him, as an altar boy, an illicit drink of wine, and goes on to talk insinuatingly about church sex scandals. The threat to lie is clear, and though innocent, Father Meade gives him money. Then the dark, faintly comic story lightens. Alone, the priest prays for forgiveness — not for any sin but for having failed to reach Prunty as a boy. It is a small glimpse of the saintly.  More vivid light out of a dark time comes in “The Children.” A widowed farmer remarries; his 12-year-old daughter cannot accept her mother’s seeming disappearance from the domestic memory. She sets herself to read all the mother’s books — she is sure they’ll be given away — and makes scenes. Her father gently remonstrates, wondering if a breakdown threatens, or even suicide. The months pass — months are often a Trevor protagonist — and matters heal. The father reflects that “time would gather up the ends and see to it that his daughter’s honoring of a memory was love that mattered also, and even mattered more.”  In the moving title story a recent widower returns at his dying wife’s request to Harry’s Bar, a Venice restaurant where they had been happy. It seems a sterile duty; all Mallory can think of is his Julia vanishing into Alzheimer’s. Often she wouldn’t recognize him; her only pleasure was playing canasta, and, for a simulacrum of ease, he would cheat to let her win.  The light comes unexpectedly. A young American couple is quarreling at a nearby table: He berates her and she is in tears. To Mallory it is a desecration of the married happiness he’d known before the hard days. Then he remembers: Such painfulness was part of the happiness. “Marriage was an uncalculated risk,” he recalled telling his wife. “Julia had agreed, and said she hoped it was enough. ‘Love’s cruel angels at play,’ she called it when they upset one another.”  Impulsively he stops the couple as they leave and tells his story. Their weather begins to clear; and so, for him, does Venice’s. He is there not to relive but, with the water, the light, and the perduring monuments, to resume living.  A version of this review appears in print on , on Page E44 of the New York edition with the headline: In Time, a Glimmer of Light in Disappointed Lives. Today's Paper|Subscribe
In these stories, William Trevor shows his ability to write of dimly disappointed lives in a way that is anything but dim.