Scrambling, even the French natives feel at home nowhere
Written: Aug 07 '08 (Updated Aug 07 '08)
Product Rating:
Pros: Afterword, Grippes and Porche, Irina, Speck's Idea
Cons: wearying if read through rather than sampled over a long time span
The Bottom Line: Gallant breaks the rules (and the very form?) of tight short-story construction. This can be exhilarating in small doses, and wearying for too rapid consumption of the collection.
Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Mavis Gallant - Paris Stories
Collections of linked short stories with the same main character -- for instance, Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son or Hemingway's Nick Adams stories -- are easier to review than collections of stories of disparate characters in multiple locations. Although the collection of Mavis Gallant stories selected and introduced by Michael Ondaatje is titled Paris Stories, only a plurality of them are set in Paris. Some more are set on the French Riviera('s less fashionable parts, between Monaco and Italy). The one I like least, "The late Homecomer" is set in Berlin, although it involves a German prisoner-of-war who was unaccountably held in France until 1950. The one that I thought while I was reading it that I liked least, "The Ice Wagon Coming Down the Street" is primarily the recollection of a feckless couple of Canadians who felt exiled in Geneva, where the husband shared an office with a drab teetotaler from Saskatchewan. (The sadness of the story lingers in my mind, lifting it from the bottom place in my ranking.)
All the stories were written in Paris, but since Ms. Gallant took herself off to Paris to write in 1950 at the age of 27, this geographic specification does not significantly differ from calling the collection "Some Mavis Gallant stories." There is a companion volume selected and introduced by Russell Banks, Varieties of Exile, with stories all of which are set in Montreal, where Gallant grew up. I found those stories mostly more satisfying, and it has a clump of five stories fictionalizing the author (under the name ''Linnet Muir") growing up, the child of English (not just Anglophone, but directly from England) parents in Montreal. Her parents placed her --their only child -- in boarding school at the ripe old age of four and she attended seventeen different Montreal schools, including a French convent one.
Not fitting in -- varieties of exile within the predominantly Francophone city of her birth -- came early, and is Gallant's major theme ("the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their own" as the jacket of Varieties of Exile put it) . A number of her characters, including the woman from Saskatchewan, the Berlin repatriate I've already mentioned, and the English (not British) family in "The Remission," one of the longest stories in the volume, are particularly lost and confused where they go (Geneva, Berlin, the Mediterranean coast). But even the Parisians are uneasy. Speck, the art dealer in another of the longest stories, "Speck's Idea' has moved his gallery often. The minor French writer Grippes spent a year in California and published a book in America. His not declaring royalties form it got him the attention of the tax authorities, M. Poche in particular. Grippes has income that is hidden, but the taxman's incomprehension of the "literary racket" keep Grippes off balance in "Grippes and Poche," one of the stories I enjoyed most (and, to me, one of the funniest).
Gallant's stories are often not short. And few honor the Aristotelian standard of unity of space and time. Many stories and plays even a large number of novels occur in short durations, but not Gallant's. Many of hers cover multiple geographic locations ("The Ice Wagon" is a good example, with memories of Paris, Geneva, Montreal, and Saskatchewan). And even more cover relatively long spans of time: years of remission on the Mediterranean for the man who goes there from England to die in "The Remission," years abroad in "The Ice Wagon," 1938-50 in "The Late Homecomer," decades in "the Moslem Wife," etc.
In her afterword, which is for me the best story of all -- that of the writer herself -- Gallant writes: "Stories are not chapters of novels. [At least hers are not!] They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait." I read that immediately after reading Ondaatje's introduction and follower her advice. (BTW, the clipped sentences are not typical of her style.) Such an approach is bad for review-writing, because the freshness of memory is compromised. (I ended up overdosing, reading all the longest stories consecutively, months after reading the shorter ones.)
Rather than being "chapters of a novel," many of Gallant's stories seem like condensed novels. Her jump-cuts (to borrow a cinematic term) appeal to Ondaatje, whose own novels are as oblique as Gallant's stories (especially, Divisadero, his most recent one, which I have difficulty considering a single novel rather than two novellas with a very tenuous link). Neither builds characters and narratives in a straight line, or even in a tight spiral. Her paragraphs and his chapters can be very disjunctive. Ondaatje lauds Gallant's stories' "quick pace and sudden. swerves." I don't think I would call them "quick-paced," but there are definitely sudden swerves. And not many epiphanies (positive or negative ones). All of these stories first appeared in the New Yorker (between 1959 and 1995 -- "In Transit" and "August" are the only ones not in chronological order of original publication. Ben Cheever characterized New Yorker stories as having an air of sadness and not much happening.
My favorite from these stories that I have not yet mentioned (set in Geneva over Christmas -- one of the shortest time spans of any of the stories) is "Irina." Hardly anything happens, but unlike many New Yorker, including many of Gallant's, I felt that the story had an ending, didn't just stop. Even the ones that seem to me to have endings (all of my favorite ones: Irina, Speck's Idea, Remission, Grippes and Porche, August) have relatively open endings. Many of the others don't have endings that satisfy me. "They were the last words they exchanged today"? Today?
Most of the stories are told by omniscient narrators. As with Muriel Spark (who wrote short stories as well as short novels), the "God's eye" perspective is a cold eye. Neither Gallant nor Spark shows the kind of compassion for her befuddled often self-defeating character than Penelope Fitzgerald had. The pretensions and other stupidities of Gallant's and Spark's character are pinned to the page rather like butterflies and other insects are pinned for display.
Spark was a Scottish writer who lived in Italy, Gallant is a Canadian writer who has long lived in Paris (whereas Penelope Fitzgerald stayed home and imagined different times and places). I don't think that Gallant's professional interest in marginality is uniquely Canadian, but is very typically Canadian (cf. Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood... and Michael Ondaatje).
In that all the stories are set in France, Francophone Switzerland, or with substantial flashbacks to France, I think the book is both Canadiana for Elvisdo's writeoff) and French enough for Barbara's. (Each of them has the final say about inclusion, of course. There are French-Canadians in Varieties of Exile, the Canadians in Paris Stories are Anglophone, and I think outnumbered by English expatriates in France.)
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