Some years ago I picked up a copy of William Trevor's Selected Stories. There must have been a glowing review somewhere, and with good reason. Since then I have been slowly working my way through the book, often reading a story or two between other books and have fallen deeply in love with Trevor and his Vermeer-like character sketches.
As I've made my way towards the end of that volume I wondered if he could keep it up at novel length or if he was (like Chekhov) really best suited for the short story. So I got my hands on a copy of the 1976 The Children of Dynmouth, which somehow struck me as a good place to start.
My instinct was rewarded. It's a wonderful little book about a small British town, about secrets, interdependency, humans. About the role of the narrator.
It made me think how it would be wonderful to reach a course called something like "Some Novels" which would not start with a reading list but would have the students and professor bring ideas into the class, jointly agree upon a list, and then read the novels together. Maybe with temporal or geographic constraints on it like "Some Post-WWII European Novels" or "Some 20th Century Asian Novels." It would be a great exercise.
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