Mavis Gallant - The Moslem Wife and Other Stories

Given that Mavis is a first-rate storyteller, I suppose it might also be expected of her that, writing in the first-person in “An Autobiography,” she should so movingly portray a Parisian woman who teaches botany to the children of the newly rich in a Swiss school in the immediate postwar years. Two of her pupils are German, and in one damning, typically understated paragraph Mavis tells us more about the new Germany than most writers can manage in a chapter of flat statement. The girls’ “parents certainly speak English, because it was needed a few years ago in Frankfurt, but the children may not remember. They are ignorant and new. Everything they see and touch at home is new. Home is built on the top layer of Ur. It is no good excavating; the fragments would be without meaning. Everything within the walls was inlaid or woven or cast or put together fifteen years ago at the very earliest.”

What is truly remarkable is that in “The Latehomecomer,” writing again in the first person, Mavis can so convincingly imagine young Thomas Bestermann, a German soldier, returning to his forlorn mother’s house in a ravaged Berlin, after having been detained overlong as a prisoner of war in France.

Years ago, V.S. Naipaul complained that he could not write any more novels set in England because he did not know what an Englishman did when he went home at night. But in this superb story, Mavis, seemingly without effort, never striking a false note, appears to convey precisely how people talked, and what they felt, in a working-class home in Berlin, circa 1950.

Mavis is an astute, unsentimental observer of the expatriate life. Never guilty of an unnecessary sentence, or redundant adjective for that matter, her beautifully composed stories can also be read for the considerable pleasure of their incidental observations. In “The Moslem Wife,” a tale of two British hotel-keepers on the Riviera, she notes: “The Riviera was no place for Americans. They could not sit all day waiting for mail and the daily papers and for the clock to show a respectable drinking time. They made the best of things when they were caught with a house they’d been rash enough to rent unseen.”

She is also blessed with a sure grasp of Ontario. In “In Youth Is Pleasure,” a charming story about a young woman returning from school in New York to the Montreal where she was born, she writes: “The first time I ever heard people laughing in a cinema was there [in New York]. I can still remember the wonder and excitement and amazement I felt. I was just under fourteen and I had never heard people expressing their feelings in a public place in my life. The easy reactions, the way a poignant moment caught them, held them still — all that was new. I had come there straight from Ontario, where the reaction to a love scene was a kind of unhappy giggling, while the image of a kitten or a baby induced a long flat ‘Aaaah,’ followed by shamed silence. You could imagine them blushing in the dark for having said that — just that ‘Aaaah.’ ” In this story, incidently, she conveys how dreadfully easy it is for an intelligent, young single woman to be dismissed and, on occasion, importuned in a man’s world, and she manages this without once stooping to flat statement or feminist cant.

“The Moslem Wife” and the other stories in this volume present some of the many fictional worlds of Mavis Gallant. But, remember, this collection, rich and far-ranging as it is, should count as no more than an introduction to the work of one of our wisest and most gifted writers.