The William Trevor Reader: “Flights of Fancy”

As I mentioned in a previous installment, there’s a compelling argument to be made—I’m making it, in other words—that William Trevor’s fiction is essentially queer fiction. His characters are usually outsiders in some way—economically, culturally, religiously, and more often than not, sexually. They are lifelong virgins, perverse fetishists, religious-erotic obsessives, self-loathing fantasists, or several of the above; when Trevor writes about a straight, sexually mainstream character, as or it is almost always in the context of infidelity. And as in the case of straight married life is depicted, at best, as grimly stultifying. One of the really interesting things about this project has been to realize that the old codger in the fisherman’s hat was producing a body of quietly transgressive work that takes as one of its main subjects and themes the violence of heteronormativity.