Deborah Treisman:
This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker Magazine. I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker. Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss. This month, we're going to hear "Bravado" by William Trevor, which was published in the New Yorker in January of 2007.

Elizabeth Strout:
"The first time she had been in the Star, the first time she had seen Manning, no more than a face in the crowd, she had admired him. He had noticed her interest he told her afterward. He said she was his kind and she didn't hesitate when he asked her to go out with him."

Deborah Treisman:
The story was chosen by Elizabeth Strout, whose most recent book, Olive, Again, an Oprah's Book Club Pick, was published in 2019. Hi Liz.

Elizabeth Strout:
Hi Deborah. How are you?

Deborah Treisman:
I'm good. Thank you for doing this in pandemic times.

Elizabeth Strout:
Oh, it's my pleasure. It really is.

Deborah Treisman:
What made you want to talk about a story by William Trevor today? Has he been important to you as a writer or a reader?

Elizabeth Strout:
Both. I think William Trevor is just such a wonderful writer and I discovered him years and years ago through the New Yorker, I might add, and I have always loved his work. There's a gentleness to it. There's a subtlety to it. He's sort of amiable in my estimation. He's got his own thing going on, which is just really, really lovely for me.

Deborah Treisman:
In a sense, he's a bit of a regionalist. His stories are, not all, but mostly set in Ireland. There's some in England. I guess I see maybe an infinity between Trevor's Ireland and your Maine.

Elizabeth Strout:
Well, that's interesting. I suppose that's completely possible. I hadn't actually thought of that. But yes, I mean, he does write about cities once in a while, but there is a sense of the smaller town or village and what goes on there, which is what I'm always interested in my own work as well.

Deborah Treisman:
Yeah. How would you describe the typical William Trevor story?

Elizabeth Strout:
Yeah. I think I would describe it as going into just the quietness of ordinary lives and all that happens within ordinary lives because most of us are ordinary and the anteriority of his characters are so well rendered. That's what I take away from him, all this, as I said, very gently, quietly told.

Deborah Treisman:
It's interesting that at the center of this story that you're reading, Bravado, there's a very not quiet event, which triggers some not quiet results in a way.

Elizabeth Strout:
Right. Right. That's true. And yet, I think in a way, even though that is the thing the story turns on, I think it would be almost a mistake to think that that was what the story was about.

Deborah Treisman:
Mm-hmm. It's interestingly structured in that there's a build up to a violent event, which might in another writer's hands be the climax of the story. But in fact, the climax is maybe the aftermath.

Elizabeth Strout:
Right. That's exactly how I was feeling about it.

Deborah Treisman:
Well, let's talk some more after the story. And now, here's Elizabeth Strout reading Bravado by William Trevor.

Deborah Treisman:
That was Elizabeth Strout reading "Bravado" by William Trevor. The story appeared in the New Yorker in January of 2007 and was included in Trevor's collection, "Cheating at Canasta," which was published by Viking later that year. So Liz, the way the story opens, it's a somewhat pastoral vision of falling leaves and peaceful night streets.

Elizabeth Strout:
Exactly and it's so interesting because he takes his time, as he always does, and yet he's unbelievably economic with his words. Just a few words in each sentence and yet the details are always extraordinary and that's why I think one can fall into his stories so quickly. You've got the man walking his dog. You've got the clapping hands to dismiss the cat rooting in a flower bed. You've got the alarm going on, flashing its orange and red. It's all right there in this very quiet part of a city or the neighborhood near a city. The very next paragraph, he says less than half a mile away, so he takes you right to where the action of the story actually begins with the night club and its band. You go with him where he goes because he has that quiet authority that any good writer should have I think.

Deborah Treisman:
Yeah. And that opening is where the action is going to take place.

Elizabeth Strout:
That's right. Exactly. So we know, if you know Trevor at all, that it's certainly not gratuitous. We're going to be there. We're coming back to that section of the town later.

Deborah Treisman:
We're coming back, but maybe not to the people that we see there now.

Elizabeth Strout:
Right. Right. But we will enter that space again.

Deborah Treisman:
For me, it's a very suspenseful first half of the story and there's a sense of mounting threat or ominousness. How does he do that?

Elizabeth Strout:
There's a couple of ways he does it. First, he has the Indian man that he speaks of who is obviously used to being abused, as he says, with demands for alcohol and potato crisps at the end of the night and then the man is on phone pretending to call the police. So there's that sense of this might always be a problem. At one point, there's also this enormous crash, I mean, well right on the second paragraph, it says, "There was a suddenness that for a moment it might have been taken as a warning of emergency or disaster, but it was just the music again bursting from the night club." But the way it's presented is like, "Oh, emergency or disaster." Those different things are sort of building up to like, "Okay, this isn't such a good situation maybe to be in."

Deborah Treisman:
He's kind of priming us for something, there's an energy of violence.

Elizabeth Strout:
Yes. Exactly. Even Manning himself, when he's pounding on the bonnet of the car, or what we would call the hood of the car, that backs up to just get away from him. You realize, "Okay, we know this scene. This is a man who's been drinking and at a night club and he's feeling his out," so to speak.

Deborah Treisman:
He's got some energy to let out.

Elizabeth Strout:
He does. Exactly.

Deborah Treisman:
It's been put into him from the music. I thought it was interesting that Trevor decided to call him Manning.

Elizabeth Strout:
I know. It's interesting. I thought so too and Mano, but his name is Martin.

Deborah Treisman:
Yeah. There's a sense in which his name is a verb. He's becoming a man, I guess. He's still a teenager.

Elizabeth Strout:
I was struck with that as well. You've got the two different women. Aisling whose father... I think there's only two sentences in this story about her father. One is when he first sees her riding on the bicycle handles of Manning's bike. He is coming the opposite direction on his bicycle with a veterinary bag hanging over the bars. That is such a great detail because you realize, "Okay, her father's a veterinarian and he's got his veterinary bag hanging over the bars." It's just kind of perfect, that image, that one image of him and he's upset with her. We only see him again after the event has taken place, where he's gentle with her. He's very real to me, just in those two small observations of him. And through him, we have more of a sense of who Aisling is and what she comes from. I thought it was very interesting that we don't see what Manning comes from because I don't think we need to.

Deborah Treisman:
Mm-hmm. We can guess it.

Elizabeth Strout:
Yeah. Exactly.

Deborah Treisman:
I mean, there's something about Aisling's father. I mean, the first scene that we see him, he's angry. He's angry at her, but it's the detail of him riding a bicycle to work with his bag hanging over the handle bars, it gives us that sense of modesty.

Elizabeth Strout:
Modesty and also that he's a man who takes care of animals. I don't know, I just felt like, "Oh, he's solid," in a way.

Deborah Treisman:
Yeah. He, in a way, even though he gets angry at Aisling, you get the sense that he builds her up, that he says, "You're worth more than this. You're better than this."

Elizabeth Strout:
She probably is, but anyway.

Deborah Treisman:
With Manning, you get the opposite sense, that people are just always tearing him down.

Elizabeth Strout:
Right. Because why would he be this way otherwise.

Deborah Treisman:
He's been slightly taken advantage of by the bouncers at the club. They've taken his miniature liquor bottle and denied it. You get the sense that he is talked down to, just by the way that Aisling's father responds to him.

Elizabeth Strout:
Exactly. Exactly.

Deborah Treisman:
It's an automatic reaction to him, so clearly something about him is visibly low class or uncouth.

Elizabeth Strout:
Right. And she's drawn to him because she's a young woman and she's drawn to him. I mean, that's pretty understandable. She just got mixed up with the wrong guy, but it's her first fellow and he makes her feel important in a way that her father probably makes her feel important too.

Deborah Treisman:
Saying she's gorgeous.

Elizabeth Strout:
It's kind of an interesting dichotomy that her father, who makes her feel important, would lead her to a man who makes her feel important, but is quite the opposite of her father.

Deborah Treisman:
Yeah. And we have this other girl there, Francie, who knows no one and no one knows. And in a sense, she's probably there as a plot device so that there's someone who will go to the police at the end.

Elizabeth Strout:
That's exactly what I was going to say. And yet, she's a very real person. I mean, I can see her and I can hear her as she's trying to get away from Kilroy. Yeah.

Deborah Treisman:
Kilroy, yeah.

Elizabeth Strout:
Because again, the details that he gives are just always so impeccably articulate. I mean, Francie had... She looked away at the assault and I thought that was an interesting detail that she looked away when it was happening, but Aisling had not looked away, so you can see their difference right there.

Deborah Treisman:
Yeah. And also, Aisling's watching because he's her boyfriend.

Elizabeth Strout:
Right, because he's her boyfriend.

Deborah Treisman:
We know from the end of the story that Aisling acknowledges to herself at some point that she got pleasure out of watching this.

Elizabeth Strout:
Which I think is very honest of Trevor, is an interesting choice to have him make that I thought.

Deborah Treisman:
Yeah. I mean, it's not pleasure at witnessing someone be hurt.

Elizabeth Strout:
No, pleasure at her ego being fed because she understands that he's doing this to impress her I think.

Deborah Treisman:
Yeah. Though afterwards, when she's expressing concern about Dalgety, Manning has second thoughts. He lies about it. He says, "I looked back and he was standing up." Why does he say that?

Elizabeth Strout:
It made perfect sense to me that someone like Manning would say. First of all, he probably hopes he is. I don't think Manning meant to take his life, so I think he's hoping he is and he's also realizes that it might have been too much for Aisling to see that. He's just intuitively understanding, "Oh, I'm just going to pretend this didn't happen," or that he was standing up. It's okay.

Deborah Treisman:
Do you think that he suspects that the attack was worse than he thought it was?

Elizabeth Strout:
I don't know. I don't know.

Deborah Treisman:
Yeah. We spend a lot of time in the story jumping from mind to mind. I mean, we open with that camera zooming in on the neighborhood. We go into Aisling's mind. We go into Dalgety's mind. We even go into the old woman, who's house it was.

Elizabeth Strout:
I know, I was going to mention her because I thought that was so interesting how he just takes us right inside her house. She's the one whose lawn this occurred on and she's this sort of relatively new widow. She doesn't like being in the house. I mean, it's like we learn so much about her in just a short period of time and she made perfect to me. I believed her completely and then they come knocking her door. That was interesting for me as well that he can take on so many points-of-view.

Deborah Treisman:
But why do you think he jumps around so much?

Elizabeth Strout:
I think because it's way of telling a story. I think that he's interested in all the details. I mean, as you can see in the very first paragraph, he's interested in all the details of that section of town. Here's therefore going to be interested in the characters. He's going to be interested in the house with the bush where the fellow has urinated, the person who lives in the house. I think he's just interested and that's his method of telling a story is to go around, move the camera around and dip it down in and then pull it back out.

Deborah Treisman:
Yeah. Well, so then to me, it's notable that the aftermath of this event is all seen through Aisling.

Elizabeth Strout:
Right and that it does become her story ultimately. What I was saying before about, for me, what the story kind of came down to was that when she hears Donovan, who says, "My sister had to go to a shrink," and ,"Some guy comes on heavy and you end up with a shrink." She hears that as the reason that Manning did this. She keeps up with that sense of it being the reason until she realizes gradually that it never came out in the trial. It never came out in the newspaper. She has to accept that's not why he did it. He did it indiscriminately and he did it to impress me. That, for me, is what the story about, her coming to terms with that. It's not so much about the poor dead fellow or even Manning, it's about Aisling realizing, "Oh, it was what it was, which is just something to impress me." Bravado.

Deborah Treisman:
And that gives her a sense of culpability or complicity.

Elizabeth Strout:
Yep. Exactly.

Deborah Treisman:
Which at the time, she had nothing to do with this. She was just there.

Elizabeth Strout:
That's exactly right.

Deborah Treisman:
But she takes it on as her fault.

Elizabeth Strout:
Exactly. She goes to the graveyard at the end. I just find the last paragraph so interesting because she might go away herself, but then instead she stayed, a different person too, belonging where the thing had happened. This is obviously something that will be a definable... Well, clearly, it would be for anybody, but this is her moment of definition in a certain way as a person.

Deborah Treisman:
Right. It's a diminishing moment right because she's gone from being this popular, beautiful, lively girl-

Elizabeth Strout:
Who would do Shakespeare on the stage and then she hears the mockery in the applause.

Deborah Treisman:
Which obviously isn't there. There's pity, which she interprets as mockery.

Elizabeth Strout:
That's right and I thought that was really interesting that you can tell that this is when she's beginning to feel culpable.

Deborah Treisman:
So she can't take the pity, she won't accept it.

Elizabeth Strout:
Right, but she feels responsible.

Deborah Treisman:
Do you think that she does belong where it happened? I mean, is there justice in-

Elizabeth Strout:
I think it's just who she is. I mean, this story could have gone many different if it had been about a different person because I don't personally find her culpable and a different person might move past it and say, "Well, that's terrible it happened. Obviously, Manning's going to be okay. 11 years, he'll be out. He's got a priest or he might not be okay." Whatever. But she, being her, really does end taking this very, very deeply to heart and feeling very culpable and that's her story and therefore, that's this story.

Deborah Treisman:
And we know that she's catholic. We know she goes to a convent school. We know she probably takes notions of sin and guilt and so on quite seriously. Yeah.

Elizabeth Strout:
And even in spite of her father being kind and saying, "We'll just learn to live with this," which in fact she is doing. She is learning to live with it, but she can't let go of it.

Deborah Treisman:
Right. It's become her life. She will have to live with it.

Elizabeth Strout:
Right. Exactly.

Deborah Treisman:
I thought it was interesting. There was a review of the collection, Cheating at Canasta, which said about Bravado, "Only in a Trevor story can you feel regret for the future."

Elizabeth Strout:
That was perfect. I think that's just lovely. Well done. Yeah. Exactly.

Deborah Treisman:
So you do, you feel this regret for something that's been taken away from Aisling.

Elizabeth Strout:
Right. There's this sadness that... It ends of a different level of sadness than one thinks it's going to because you think the sadness is the boy's death, but the sadness is the part of her that seems to die as well.

Deborah Treisman:
Yeah. And in a sense, we know she's not actually guilty of this crime, but in a sense, Manning and Donovan aren't entirely guilty because they didn't know... He died because he had a weak heart and another boy would have been able to stand up to it. So Trevor in a way lets everyone off, except that their lives are ruined.

Elizabeth Strout:
Right and that's very typical of Trevor. I think that Trevor is unbelievably always generous to all of his characters. I mean, he's never, in my estimation, he's never judgmental when he goes to the page about anything. He's just reporting on who we are and what we do and we know these guys. We've known them or people like them and we understand that this is what can happen. He makes his story out of it.

Deborah Treisman:
There's this interesting period of limbo where the news comes out and no one goes to the police. Aisling doesn't go to the police, even though she knows right away.

Elizabeth Strout:
I thought that was interesting as well. It's obviously Francie who spills the beans and that makes sense to me that Francie would. I sort of interpreted it as Aisling being kind of frozen at that point, just really almost not being able to believe it and not knowing what to do, which almost makes sense for somebody that young to be hit with this and what do you do? Obviously, you should go to the police, but that moment of being frozen made sense to me psychologically, that she just wouldn't know what to do as she was trying to believe that it had actually happened.

Deborah Treisman:
And also, clinging to the idea that this was an act of retribution for what he had done to Hazel.

Elizabeth Strout:
Exactly, so she's going to stay out of it for the moment as she tries to sort through it.

Deborah Treisman:
Yeah. I think she probably suspects she's got it wrong, but doesn't want to be told that.

Elizabeth Strout:
Right. That was what was the most interesting to me was how she just kept clinging to that idea that this was all about Donovan's sister having to go to a shrink.

Deborah Treisman:
Yeah. Yeah, but she doesn't say it to the police.

Elizabeth Strout:
No. Obviously, nobody said it to the police.

Deborah Treisman:
I think it shows possibly that Aisling herself doesn't believe it by then and the fact that she's going to the police also means she's just given up on Manning.

Elizabeth Strout:
And she's doing the right thing.

Deborah Treisman:
Yes, though it was never going to feel like the right thing to her.

Elizabeth Strout:
I know. I know. I know. I know. Exactly.

Deborah Treisman:
And now she belongs there and now she's never getting away from it.

Elizabeth Strout:
Never to leave apparently. I mean, I kept thinking, "Well okay, she's just going to stay there for awhile," because in my imagination, I wanted her to be able to take off and leave, but or we know that she stayed, belonging where the thing had happened.

Deborah Treisman:
I find that last line very evocative of Alice Munro as well.

Elizabeth Strout:
Yes.

Deborah Treisman:
It feels like a Munro ending.

Elizabeth Strout:
It does. Yeah. I agree. I've always thought that Alice Munro and William Trevor, they were like two of my favorite writers and they have such great authority. I mean, Alice Munro has very definite authority on the page and William Trevor has a much quieter authority, but he's got it just as much as she does. They are not interested in any sort of sentimentality even remotely, which is just so great.

Deborah Treisman:
And they also have that ability to move through time in a sentence.

Elizabeth Strout:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Deborah Treisman:
To say, "And this is how the life ends," in one sentence. "This is what all the decades will bring." There's something sort of... I don't want to say forceful because Trevor's not forceful, but there's something absolutely authoritative.

Elizabeth Strout:
I think he quietly makes his points. I mean, actually the quietness almost makes the point even louder in a way. Not louder, but it makes it stronger.

Deborah Treisman:
Yeah. Another thing that's interesting to me is when Trevor wrote the story, he was, if not 80, close to 80.

Elizabeth Strout:
Yeah. Isn't it amazing?

Deborah Treisman:
And yet, he's completely immersed in the mind of these teens.

Elizabeth Strout:
I know. I was thinking about that as well because... Well, his imagination could cast a very wide net, I mean, as we know, from all the multitude of characters that he's created through his career. His imagination is sort of boundless in a way. The fact that he was so much older and could go back with such accuracy. From my point-of-view, these are real young people. We know them. We've seen them. We know them and we believe them and he could capture that.

Deborah Treisman:
Well, thank you so much Liz.

Elizabeth Strout:
Oh, you're so welcome. Thank you very much.

Deborah Treisman:
William Trevor, who died in 2016, was the author of more than three dozen novels and short story collections, including the Whitbread Prizing winning, Felicia's Journey, 2009's Loving Summer and Last Stories, which was published posthumously in 2018. He published 50 stories in the New Yorker between 1977 and 2018. Elizabeth Strout is the author of seven books of fiction, including "Amy and Isabelle," "My Name is Lucy Barton," and "Olive Kitteridge," for which she won the Pulitzer Price in 2009. "Olive Again," a sequel to "Olive Kitteridge," was published in 2019.

Deborah Treisman:
You can download more than 160 previous episodes the New Yorker Fiction Podcast or subscribe to the podcast for free in the Apple Podcast section of the iTunes stores. On the Writer's Voice Podcast, you can hear short stories from the magazine read by their authors. You can find the Writer's Voice and other New Yorker podcasts on your podcast app. Tell us what you thought of this program on our Facebook page or rate and review us in Apple Podcasts. The New Yorker Fiction Podcast is produced by Michele Moses. I'm Deborah Treisman. Thanks for listening.