For three summers now Paul and I have had listeners vote for The Mookse and Gripes Podcast Summer Book Club readalong. The first year, we read Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady, and we discussed the book with Chris Wolak here. Last year, we read Natalia Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart, and we discussed the book with Kim McNeil and Merve Emre here. I’m so glad those two books won — I loved each — but each of those years we also had a William Trevor book in the running. Since he didn’t win either year, but we both really wanted to read one of his books for the summer book club, we decided this year the only choices would be William Trevor novels. The Story of Lucy Gault was the winner, and we posted our conversation with Kim Forrester here. But I still wanted to write just a bit as it helps me remember the book — and I really loved The Story of Lucy Gault.

Now, I’ve had this book on my shelf for fifteen to twenty years, but I hadn’t read it for some reason. I even got the new edition Penguin put out (pictured here) a few years ago, and it still took this episode to get me to finally read what many have called a masterpiece by one of my all-time favorite writers. For some reason I had it in my head that this was the story of a runaway (Lucy Gault), and that we’d follow her from place to place, running into various people who, for better or for worse, teach her a life lesson. There are many such books, but I don’t particularly love them. Maybe that wrong impression was why I didn’t read The Story of Lucy Gault sooner. As it turns out, the book is a story of a runaway kind of. It’s about a runaway who stays behind, and it’s an absolutely gorgeous rumination on the passage of time and the persistence of pain and grief and, sometimes, kindness.

The book begins on June 21, 1921, the night Lucy’s father, Captain Everard Gault, fired a warning shot over the heads of three young arsons coming to express their disdain for the Anglo-Irish loyalists. Gault, to his dismay, ends up hitting one of the young men in the shoulder. Unable to express his sorrow to the young man’s family and to the community, and fearful of further reprisals, Gault and his wife decide they need to move to England. At this time, Lucy is just nine years old, and she doesn’t want to leave. Hoping that if she’s not there to go with them they won’t be able to go, she hides. She hides too well, and because the only clues she inadvertently leaves behind suggest she has perished by drowning, her grief-stricken parents leave as quickly as they possibly can, and they don’t have the heart to look back.

But Lucy is not dead, and this book follows her through her life as the child left behind, which she feels is entirely her own fault. The book also follows her parents as they travel and try to find some escape from their past, and it follows the folks in the Irish community who undertake the care of young Lucy.

The short book contains so much I burst even thinking about it. Each person in the story has a tremendously nuanced and compassionately rendered life. Somehow he does this in brief tangents. The amazing thing to me is that this not only takes an incredible amount of skill but it also underlines some of his main themes. We learn about these characters by seeing how they experience time and how memory affects their day-to-day lives. Trevor can do this beautifully in brief snippets. For example, here is a brief passage early in the novel, when Captain Gault, apparently after an endless, sleepless night, is thinking about what they’re leaving behind:

Here and in the house, all memory was regret, all thought empty of consolation. There hadn’t been time to have the initials inscribed on the blue suitcase, yet how could there not have been time since time so endlessly stretched now, since the days that came, with their long, slow nights, carried with them a century’s weight?

‘Oh, my darling!’ Captain Gault murmured, watching yet another dawn. ‘Oh, my darling, forgive me.’

I feel the weight of that night, though Trevor spent only a brief moment writing about it. Not only that, but I feel the endlessness of it, as it will continue to reverberate through Captain Gault’s days. And yet, the brevity also contains within it something else that is remarkable about the passage of time and the seeming permanence, but ultimate impermanence, of it all. It reminds me of the title of one of my other favorite books of the year: Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. This sentiment is said in another way by one of the characters in Lucy Gault: “Life, he never tired of reminding them in a sensible Swiss way, was short, even when it went on a bit.”

I don’t know how Trevor does it. I read and reread his stories, always amazed and yet none the wiser as to how he works the magic.

Please give our episode all about this book a listen. You can find it here.