The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant

Anyone who has read Mavis Gallant’s short stories in The New Yorker or elsewhere will immediately recognize her skill and style as a master storyteller and writer in this final collection of her work. A prolific perfectionist in her writing, Gallant makes one marvel at her vivid word choices, descriptions of people and place, and her dedication to stories of people who are unlikely to be among her readers. They are often emerging adults, people with limited lives and little hope who suffer their poignant status quietly.

First time readers of her work may want to begin at the end of this almost 600-page collection of her work where three very short stories introduce her style in an appendix. The openings are typical; Gallant dives right in at the start of a story and sets scenes that brilliantly showcase descriptive scene setting.    

In “Good Morning and Goodbye” she begins with this: “He opened his eyes that morning and remembered first that he was sad, and then why. . . . He lay there and looked at the leaves and the crooked piece of blue between [the trees] and thought, I, Paul am going away again.”  Immediately we want to know where and why.

In “Three Brick Walls,” after a short opening of two sentences she describes a room (perhaps occupied by Paul in the first story). “It was his first night in the room. The key to the front door lay slantwise on the bureau, but he was not yet aware that it belonged to him and could be used. The paper on the wall was blurred and brown. There was a single bed with a green-and-white striped seersucker bedspread, and a chair wedged between the foot of the bed and the window. The bureau was painted green. The drawers were lined with brown paper and there were crumbs in the corners under the paper.” Who reads this and doesn’t see clearly the drab situation the protagonist finds himself in?

The collection is broken into three sections: Stories of North America, Stories of Southern Europe, and Stories of Paris and Beyond. Each section’s stories are inspired by places Gallant has lived. The lengths vary, and one of them is novella length. But what they share is Gallant’s masterful writing, whether they are told in the first person or third. The situations are varied but they all carry a poignant tale of human nature, suffering, life’s challenges, and acceptance or resilience. We are not likely to want to be in the drab rooms or engage with the central characters for too long, but we feel almost trapped ourselves while there with them.

Gallant, who was born in Montreal and lived in Paris, wrote in a variety of genres including novels, plays, essays and especially short stories. One hundred and sixteen of her stories were published in The New Yorker over the course of her career, and she was often compared to John Cheever, John Updike, and Alice Munro. This collection includes more than 30 stories never before gathered into one volume.

One of them is “Dede,” the story of a dysfunctional family where a boy named Dede has come to stay because his grandmother can no longer look after him. The entire situation is full of banal, strange conversations, and even stranger characters. Some time later, Dede appears again at the family’s home.

“He is said to be different now,’” says the narrator. “He has a part time job with a television polling service: every day he is given a list of telephone numbers in the Paris area, and he calls to see what people were watching the night before. . . . The [prior host family] have never tried to get in touch with him [although he now lives in a flat near them] or invited him to a meal.” It’s all mysterious and in a way comical. It’s also quite typical of Gallant’s other stories. We marvel at the writing while scratching our heads to deconstruct the meaning of the story.

The collection’s editor, Garth Hallberg, writes in his lengthy introduction to the book says of this story that Gallant typically “experiments with structure, language, and interiority with a sense of freedom brought under calm control.”

That seems true, and her struggle to use those elements of storytelling is laudable, but it does mean she draws a special kind of short story readers. Those who like Updike, Cheever, and Munro will likely relish Gallant’s work—for which she was awarded the Canadian Fiction Prize, and the PEN/Nabokov Award.