The stories of Mavis Gallant

One of the stories concerns a writer and his taxman; another turns upon a young American woman in Paris, newly married, depressed and given to sleeping all day, who despises her mother and dreams of a pony she'll ride, "into her father's arms." A story, "The Remission," ends with the protagonist, an Englishman who's suffering a withering illness surrounded by an unfaithful wife and their three children in a mansion going to seed on the French Riviera, dying. "He ceased to be, and it made absolutely no difference after that whether or not he was forgotten."

So much is made of sentences these days that one could come to believe that sentences make up the whole of the literature. Mavis Gallant's sentences are composed of one impelling thought and feeling after another; even the most disinterested reader will be challenged to find fault with any of them; her stories are actual events.

It's worthwhile to take a few moments to think of Mavis Gallant and Samuel Beckett being in Paris at the same time-writing their stories after the war and well on into the times of peace and prosperity, the rise of NATO and the IMF-two indispensable guides to our time. It's difficult to think of two writers who could be more similarly dissimilar, yet so very alike. "People in the habit of asking themselves silent useless questions look for answers in mirrors," Gallant writes in her story, "The Latehomecomer," a sentence that could have been written by Samuel Beckett but wasn't, and is perhaps as close as they come to one another stylistically. The more one reads Gallant the more one sees how different she is from any other writer, until finally the reader begins to wish his days and nights would pass like a story by Mavis Gallant; that everything thought and felt, no matter how painful, would seem true, the way things really are to a distinguished mind.

In her story, "The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street," she writes of Peter, a Canadian ex-pat living in Geneva, "he had a manner of strolling to work as if his office were a pastime, and his real life a secret so splendid he could share it with no one except himself." Mavis Gallant, born in Canada in. 1922, began her career as a journalist. She lived most of her life in Paris, and died there in 2014.