JAMES HERRIOT'S DOG STORIES
St. Martin's Press; 427 pages; $19.95
"I spent a lifetime treating the ailments of cows, horses, sheep and pigs, yet here I am, in my twilight years, bringing out a volume of my dog stories." So begins James Herriot's wholly unnecessary apologia. The Yorkshire vet's style is unadorned, his message is affectionate, and his four- footed characters are irresistible. Here he has gathered 50 recollections of canines, some of them sentimental, a few tragic and at least one--the story of a terrier male who abruptly becomes attractive to other males--as odd as anything in the Decameron. Herriot recalls that in his student days domestic animals were customarily listed in descending order of importance: horse, ox, sheep, pig, dog. In the latest work, he has brought his favorites to the front and given them a new leash on life.
THE NEWS FROM IRELAND
by William Trevor
Viking; 285 pages; $16.95
The good news is that the past is still very much alive in William Trevor's latest stories. As in previous collections, such as The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Lovers of Their Time, national and personal histories cast a haunting twilight over a lonely present. This works particularly well in the title story of The News from Ireland, which is set in the 1840s. That, of course, is the period of the great famine that sent more than 1 million Irish to the New World. It is also the time when a family of English Protestants named Pulvertaft arrives in Ireland to take over the house and estate of a dead relative. The sense of strangeness and dislocation that Trevor evokes in this story can be felt in today's Anglo-Irish relations. Verity in On the Zattere also feels out of joint. She is a beautiful 38-year-old woman who has accompanied her widowed father on his annual autumn trip to Venice: "Without meaning to, Verity had taken her mother's place." People in Trevor's stories do not awaken from dreams so much as they fall into the deep sleep of illusion. Nancy Simpson, the ex-chorus girl in Lunch in Winter, muses about her youth while she sits in a hotel bar waiting for the right man to come along: "She could see the stairs, where sooner or later the chap would appear. He'd buy a drink and then he'd look around and there she'd be." In Music, Justin Condon, a traveling salesman of women's underwear, sustains himself with the vision of being a romantic composer. Yet these characters do not come across as failures. Trevor makes the yearnings of ordinary people seem as significant as the accomplishments of the exceptional.
"AND SO IT GOES"
by Linda Ellerbee
Putnam; 255 pages; $16.95