Books: Tales of Lovers and Haters

FOOLS OF FORTUNE by William Trevor; Viking; 239 pages; $13.95 THE STORIES OF WILLIAM TREVOR; Penguin; 799 pages; $12.95

The winners celebrate the past as history; the losers mourn it as fate. Anglo-Irish Author William Trevor is familiar with both perspectives, although he understands as well as any contemporary writer that the defeated, the shelved and the slightly batty make better fiction: the lonely duffers in The Old Boys (1964); the washed-up crew of residents in The Boarding House (1965); Lady Dolores, the antiadultery crusader of The Love Department (1966). Trevor's characters are not underdogs in any social or political sense. They can be obtuse, thoughtless, silly and casually cruel. His style, fully displayed in this complete collection of his short stories and a new novel, is formal and astringent, though never arch.

Trevor, 55, was born and raised in Ireland, educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and currently lives in Devonshire in southwest England. He is a close observer of the unexceptional: businessmen of Cork, aging maidens from the provinces, London office workers and suburban matrons. They are mostly people who are meeting or avoiding their responsibilities with only an occasional glimpse of their destinies. Trevor has a soft spot for the elderly, like the dapper old soldier in The General's Day who attempts to pick up a younger woman only to learn, at the moment his hand brushes her knee, that he never was a serious contender.

There is an honor in the general's ailed sortie that cannot be found in the easy conquests of Angels at the Ritz, a tale exploring the limits of suburban society and marital entropy. A husband returns o a spouse-swapping party after taking his wife home. Her subdued reaction con-ains the author's gloomy assessment of the situation, if not of the entire age of affluence and permissiveness. "The outer suburb was what it was, so was the shell of middle age; she didn't complain because it would be silly to complain when you were fed and clothed and comfortable, when your children were cared for and warm, when you were loved and respected."

Trevor has not missed the comic side of the sexual revolution. Lovers of Their Time finds a travel-agency clerk and a shop girl meeting daily in an unused hall bathroom of a commercial hotel. It is an ample facility where the couple picnic, frolic in the tub and plan their future before catching the train home: she to her mother, he to a randy wife. Tristram and Isolde as commuters in a tiled cave of love is an entertaining conception. Trevor does more; he dignifies the lovers with a deep understanding of their passions and the mundane force that must inevitably cool them.