From Overhead in a Balloon: Twelve Stories of Paris (1985)
"What is Style?" p. 356
-- style intrinsic; -- to sense of impermanence
-- "Is it dead or alive?" -- mortality?
-- style an author's thumbprint, uniqueness of"Rue de Lille":
-- style? As sense of mortality -- wife has has died;
-- distance: window image; conversation over first wife; not coming to watch the television programme
-- arbitrariness of their life; her death; not being CatholicGrazia Merler observes in her book, Mavis Gallant: Narrative Patterns and Devices, that "Psychological character development is not the heart of Mavis Gallant's stories, nor is plot. Specific situation development and reconstruction of the state of mind or of heart is, however, the main objective." Frequently, Gallant's stories focus on expatriate men and women who have come to feel lost or isolated; marriages that have grown flimsy or shabby; lives that have faltered and now hover in the shadowy area between illusion, self-delusion, and reality.
-- http://collections.ic.gc.ca/heirloom_series/volume5/226-227.htm
Gallant's stories of men and women--and these include a few tales of trusting men let down by untrustworthy women--follow a basic pattern: Someone (possessing a naiveté perhaps reminiscent of the 27-year-old who ran off to Paris to write) offers someone else his or her love and is let down, but still manages to get up in the morning for the next several decades. These stories are the tightest and the best designed, and they yield her most memorable lines, dark, ironic compressions of incompatible worldviews. Netta, for instance, "took it for granted, now she was married, that Jack felt as she did about light, dark, death, and love," and from that we understand that separation is inevitable.
Document created March 18th 2001