The William Trevor Reader: “Office Romances”

For this week’s installment, I want to talk about alcohol—its role in Trevor’s fiction and fiction in general. Without bothering to thumb back through  to check, I would estimate that alcohol appears in 80 to 90 percent of the stories and features dramatically in maybe a third of them, possibly more. By “features dramatically,” I mean that alcohol somehow causes characters to behave in ways they wouldn’t otherwise, that it drives character action. Offhand, ” and all in one way or another turn on a character