STORIES YOU LIVE WITHIN.

The Hill Bachelors
William Trevor
Viking, $22.95, 245 pp.

The Hill Bachelors gives strong support to the growing consensus that William Trevor is one of the very best writers of short stories alive. One can open this book, pick a paragraph at random, and imagine dozens of ways Trevor could have written it less effectively and did not, ways he could have added, or failed to excise, a word or phrase that would have made it easier, more explicit, but less focused in its power to disturb or to force recognition.

The stories, a dozen in this collection, are set in Ireland, England, and France, and many of them gently unravel mysteries. Following Horace's recipe for effective narration, they drop us--in medias res--into situations already defined. Then, in the reticent modern manner established by Chekhov and Joyce, they provoke us to ask the questions that Homer and Virgil (Horace's reference points) explicitly put to the muse: what is this scene that we have happened upon and what brought (what brings) these characters to it? In some of the stories, the characters themselves ask this question, and the crisis, usually muted, is their discovery of the answer. In others the characters know the answer only too well and have covered it with a muffling scar tissue, so that we, though privy to their thoughts, only gradually become aware of its true outlines.

The latter procedure is difficult to bring off. Joseph Heller did it--on a different scale and with technical means that Trevor denies himself here--in Catch-22 and Something Happened. To be successful, the author must convince us that the delayed revelation, which serves his needs as a storyteller, also serves the needs of the characters whose minds we have entered. The inhibitions that characters impose on their speech are irrelevant here. We must accept as credibly motivated and not dishonestly contrived an evasion, within the characters' very thoughts, of memories that have given their lives their essential forms.

Two stories illustrate this procedure, and, although both are affecting, they achieve different levels of success. "Low Sunday, 1950" introduces us to Tom and Philippa, a brother and sister whose enduring relationship and joint occupancy of a deceased aunt's suburban house both relate to their father's violent death in Dublin in 1916. Now, at age forty-two, Tom seems about to marry, and Philippa, three years younger, will vacate the house, anticipating a life as a maiden aunt in a downtown Dublin flat. The evasions that delay our recognition of this prospect have a clear motivation in the siblings' regard for one another. One understands, as well, Trevor's design in retarding the story of the father's death as a parallel revelation. But the needs of his design are not those of Tom and Philippa. Low Sunday is the anniversary of that death, and its story is uppermost in their minds. In the very first paragraph, Philippa wonders "if her brother could possibly have forgotten what Sunday it was," and it is the author's hand, only just too visible, that stops the current of her thought.

"Three People," on the other hand, is entirely successful in its manipulation of memory in the service of both narrative structure and character. Sidney, a thirty-four-year-old janitor who is perhaps mildly retarded, does handyman chores for Vera, a forty-one-year-old woman who lives with her old and declining father. In the father's eyes, their relationship is a protracted, diffident courtship. They carefully sustain this belief, nicely symbolized by a rosebush in the backyard, to hide from him the truth about a terrible event that brought the three of them together fourteen years earlier. In deluding the father, Vera and Sidney partly delude themselves as well. These intersecting, willed delusions motivate the fragmented unfolding in the minds of all three of what really happened. But the delusions will not outlast the father. "Without him," Vera knows, "there would be no reason to play these parts; no reason to lose themselves in deception...without her father, they would frighten one another." This story is an astonishing performance.

Three other stories also deal with male-female relationships--marriages in these cases--completed in ways not at first understood by the presence of a third person. In "Good News," a child actress wins a role in a TV mystery, thereby financing the reunion of her pushy stage mother with her charming but feckless father. In the process, the nine-year-old is disturbed by the half-understood sexual content of the program and the abusive attentions of the leading man. In "A Friend in the Trade," the decision of a happily married couple in their fifties to move to Sussex precipitates the wife's recognition that a self-absorbed, "unpresentable" friend who has haunted their London house has been in love with her since her children were infants. In "Death of a Professor," a false obituary planted as a hoax by students leads its subject, by surprising indirection, to the discovery of a colleague's bitter jealousy of his marriage to a beautiful, much younger woman.

Three of the best stories, "Of the Cloth," "The Virgin's Gift," and the book's title story, deal with a different sort of mystery, the kind that is enacted rather than unraveled. In the first two, the mystery is literally religious, and in the last it is something very like that. The protagonists make important renunciations of "the world" in favor of something in a different dimension, revealed by unlooked-for intuitions of spiritual wholeness. An old Anglican rector and a young Catholic priest find their churches, in different ways, obsolete, and yet discover that between them they have transformed the life of a disabled farm worker. A monk responds to dream visions of the Virgin that order him further and further into contemplative isolation on and beyond Ireland's west coast and thence, magically or blessedly, back into the circle of his parents' love. Five children gather to bury their father, and the youngest, a disregarded bachelor, renounces the hope of marriage to take over the unwanted family farm in the hills that "had waited for him, claiming one of their own" as his father had never done. It is rare to find such themes--such difficult happy endings--so convincingly treated in modern English.

Daniel M. Murtaugh teaches at Florida Atlantic University.