Close Encounters of the Trevor Kind
I’m afraid to begin; well, not afraid to tackle the narrative exposition of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but rather to place any narrative in relief against a story by William Trevor. That’s just how my entertainment panned out this past weekend up north. We were treated to Close Encounters, a film I’d never seen before, just after I’d read another story of Trevor’s, The Crippled Man, and I was left motionless on the couch, glancing left and right to see if it was safe to surface and register an opinion of the UFO moovee.
Turned out it wasn’t safe, because someone in our company had just proclaimed Close Encounters hands-down their favorite Spielberg film. Really? I ventured. Even against JAWS? Jaws is one of the greatest film scripts ever cooked up. It’s bristling with foreshadowing and social commentary about blasé fatcat pols keeping tourists happy despite the obvious menace swimming offshore, a death wish and Richard Dreyfuss hilariously comparing Robert Shaw’s thresher shark scar to his scar on his chest where Mary Ellen Moffatt broke his heart. Anyway, but Close Encounters, despite having Dreyfuss again, has none of that.
I am also late to the party with late Irish author William Trevor. For years, decades, people have heaped praise on his subtle tales of lonesome characters yearning for absolution or dignity against lives marked with pride and mistakes, but I had never picked up one of his books. Then after reading and being ruined by The Story of Lucy Gault, I didn’t know if I could handle another story by Trevor. They grab me by the sternum and rattle me. The minute I sense only two more pages left in one of his stories, my breath speeds up. With a paragraph left, I groan, no! beg for relief. I cry, oh come on, man, you can’t do this to me. He keeps destroying me, yet I keep picking up the book, in this case, Last Stories, and reading another. How can I compare Trevor’s colorful characters with the experience of two and a half hours of Richard Dreyfuss’ sweaty face and bleary eyes watching a UFO play synthesizer with the U.S. government as it lands on Devil’s Tower, Wyoming?
Everyone in Close Encounters, including the government, is innocently and sincerely staring into the night sky for aliens to come and land. And they do. After racing around a highway curve at night, a fun scene promising more fun scenes to come, the UFO lands, and everyone is enthralled. Everyone is enraptured, I guess. The UFO does not appear to risk their lives, they’re not fighting the government man. I guess Dreyfuss’ marriage is breaking up and he kisses another blond whose kid was taken by aliens, but despite that kiss and that kidnapping, you couldn’t care less about what happens to the boy or to Dreyfuss’ marriage, or whatever the government is doing to contact the aliens. Because man, it’s 1977, we’re all finding ourselves in different ways, women questioning and actualizing themselves — haha — men getting appropriately disillusioned, everything’s all right, and the government is finally on our side. They even put Dreyfuss in a red matching jump suit and kick him off earth with the UFO. Thank god for small favors. This moovee made me want to bury Dreyfuss or Spielberg under Devil’s Tower.
Which brings me back to The Crippled Man by Trevor, about 24 pages long. What’s that all about, you ask, some guy in a wheelchair? I don’t recall reading about a wheelchair. I recall hopping from intimate voice to voice, from distant cousin and caregiver Martina’s to the crippled man, to butcher Costigan, to the Polish painters, and back around. I remember learning everyone’s interest in a piece ostensibly dealing with the outdoor painting of the house walls. Interest feels evenly carved up. Every section separated by three asterisks shifts the perspective and emotional intimacy. You cannot tell whether honesty or lies will win out. Whether virtue or vice. That’s what it’s about. The soft and shocking ending will hit you so that as I said before, you will say, No no, it cannot be. Is that the way it’s going to be? Come on, William! Give us a break over here. We could sure use it.
No, don’t give us a break. This is why I will keep reading masters like William Trevor. What we really need is more stories where darkness and light duke it out, where you fall into caring for fading, fifty year old Martina who probably squandered her youth, but she is doing the best she can.
Please have a close encounter with William Trevor. You will not regret it.