I am conflicted. I have to make room in my small home for an office space when I get a job after college, and I don’t want to give up my William Trevor books. Trevor wasn’t a horror author. In fact, he wrote about broken families and unfulfilled romantic relationships like someone with intimate knowledge of things, but he was the first author that made me want to be HIM. Okay, maybe I felt the same after reading Poppy Z. Brite’s Wormwood, the first book in the ’90s to remind me of my love for horror. Still, I’m planning to keep my William Trevor books even if I’m donating my one and only book shelf in the house. This makes my move to ebooks all but certain and comes with some sadness. Who else is contemplating a permanent investment in ebooks because they don’t have space in a small home?
It was Trevor who made me want to fuse literary writing with accessible genre writing, adding a dose of complex sentence structure with urgency and edginess. While I dabbled in it myself and like the result, I certainly feel like holding on to my Trevor books to remember what heartbreak first sounded like, how an unrequited love was supposed to stay with me for years. Trevor wrote enlightened era fiction at the cusp of postmodernism, telling stories that mattered as much as the writing did, even if his short stories were short bursts of brilliance that didn’t require quite an immersion into another world.
He preceded Hemingway and the postmodern revolution of simple language. He was also a poster child of the era before him, wedging him in a transition period that would pull his literary sensibilities in opposite directions.
Still, he wrote with an eye on the signs of the times without forgetting the volumes he had loved in his youth. By doing so, he merged easy, palatable narration with a mastery at sophistication. When emotion needed the appropriate rendition, he used buoyancy, style, and an effortless command of the English language so impressive, the word, ‘verve’ seems to have lacked requisite flair.
Reading his work brings back the jitters, the realization coming from the butterflies in my stomach that I am in the presence of greatness. By describing my work as literary, I clearly did not imply that my work was unnecessarily complex, especially considering the large sections of distilled, nuanced writing. Rather, my work has balance, walking down a tight-rope between accessible genre writing and effusive language. My work offers paragraphs worth of svelte, cleverly wrought lines and complex sentence structure, especially with the most violent parts, but the literary aesthetics never teeter on sensory overload. This is also a premise I tried to adopt from Trevor’s work, albeit with disparate results.
Regardless if readers ‘get’ my writing or not, or even understand what elements and methods contribute to the creation of literary fiction, I will keep the brazen confidence of a literary author on top of his game. In fact, one mention of the word ‘literary’ might drive readers to project some pretty unrealistic expectations on my work. Even literary prose stylist Cormac McCarthy has had one-star Goodreads reviews that describe his work as drivel. And even the quietly brilliant William Trevor, himself, has had one-star reviews that unintelligibly garble at his undeserved greatness. If that’s the case, bring on the one-star reviews, minions!
Still, Trevor was rarely criticized harshly by someone desperately trying to prove themselves clever. He was infallible. That was what I envied most about him. He was in a league of his own, and nobody criticized him out of a lack of good intentions because his work simply oozed brilliance. Maybe some critics would have claimed that he went to the well too often, writing about failed relationships and lost love like there was nothing else. No matter how much he did, I binged on his short stories with unfailing admiration, reading slowly to appreciate each syllable, feeling every fabric of my being pulled by the lulling, drubbing power of his narration, the language so smooth and heartbreakingly expressive it went down like hard liquor mixed half and half with cream. The way he pulled heartstrings by means of plain language cannot understate how words could have such powerful breadth and meaning, beauty captured not merely in the descriptions of unforgettable scenes but in the medium that served as their vessel.
Now that he’s gone, I feel more than ever that I should hold on to my copies of his books. More than any other writer in the English language, he made me want to write like a man inspired to manifest brilliance, and for that, I must thank him.
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