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...