The William Trevor Reader: “Cocktails at Doney’s”
by Adam O’Fallon Price
Apr 18, 2023
3 minutes
The first half of “Cocktails at Doney’s” features a very similar set-up to the superior : a middle-aged expat British man encounters a beautiful woman who falls in love with him. In both stories, the woman is a superficial, oversharing chatterbox who is drawn to the deeply reserved man, a reserve hiding a similar problem—in “In Isfahan,” our protagonist is a serial cuckold; in “Cocktails at Doney’s,” he is serially impotent. Both stories are told from the man’s perspective, although we learn
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