The William Trevor Reader: “Coffee with Oliver”
A good writing rule of thumb a professor once gave me is that you should never be smarter than your characters. I think this is mostly true: there is something singularly dispiriting about reading a story in which an oblivious narrator or protagonist bumbles jerkily around like a marionette pulled by the invisible strings held by a smug, superior author. It isn’t a matter of realism—people do behave like idiots all the time in real life—but a
