The William Trevor Reader: “O Fat White Woman”
Realist fiction is an interesting proposition to consider. Hopefully it’s interesting, anyway, since it’s what I’m considering this week, vis-a-vis ’s “O Fat White Woman.” The strangely, Cheeveresquely named “O Fat White Woman” concerns a Mrs. Digby-Hunter, whose husband has founded a successful remedial preparatory school, a stately ivy-covered institution in which he and the other head, Mr. Beade, savagely beat the boys for their own pleasure, a ritual abuse from which one of the boys has suddenly died. Before we get to that, though, we get Mrs. Digby-Hunter, sunning herself on the British equivalent of
