Mavis Gallant Long Fiction Analysis
Because most of Mavis Gallant’s works do not have conclusive endings, it is difficult to cite in traditional terms the theme or central idea governing her fiction. It may be more important to understand the point of reference from which Gallant views her characters, most of whom are middle-class men and women, children, and adolescents who are adrift in a confused sea of unmet expectations. Her view of her characters is almost always from without, classically dispassionate. A recurring image in her work is the mirror, which shows herprotagonists with pitiless accuracy, faces they often do not recognize as their own, as in the case of “The Late-Homecomer” in From the Fifteenth District. Despite the incoherence of the characters’ lives, the world they inhabit is carefully and cleanly drawn, technically precise, perfect in detail. Gallant’s descriptions of a train station, a café, or a sitting room are exact as to proportion, color, and shape; in contrast, her characters are often indistinct except for their crippling flaws. This indistinctiveness is suggestive, however, never obscuring. Although her characters are emotionally confused and unable to lift themselves out of the morass of indecision and compromise in which they are stranded, they evoke no pity, no sentiment other than a wistful compassion.
Gallant’s concern with homelessness or displacement draws her to the strange amid the familiar. Rest stops—a café, a party, a day’s outing—become symbols of the only kind of home her characters are ever likely to have. Anticipation is the rule; farther down the coast perhaps, or next season, or even tomorrow at a friend’s, things will begin to come clear, problems will begin to resolve themselves. Gallant’s figures are often people of little imagination, burdened with insufficient insight and strength of will to take control of their lives. Inevitably, they drift toward disasters, the consequences of which they foresee dimly, if at all. They live more on hope than by the efficacy of their own actions. The warning sounds they should heed in order to save themselves occur to them as echoes, as sounds of a past already too late to change. Gallant’s sense of time is geometric rather than linear: Lives collide and rearrange themselves like billiard balls subject to the tyranny of physics. Personal realities may be contemporaneous, but they never interpenetrate.
Often the sole correspondence between characters is a familial one, to which they give no more thought than to the color of their hair or to next Sunday’s dinner. For Gallant, relationship by marriage or blood is almost certain to destroy whatever humanness could exist in the bonds between people. Some of her stories rehearse the chronicle of a thoughtless parent, usually a mother, spending her child’s future to pay the debts of her own present, as if another’s life were capital to be borrowed and squandered. “Going Ashore” in The Other Paris offers the flighty Mrs. Ellenger and her daughter, Emma, as an example of this kind of relationship. The spectacle of shallow interests, selfishness, fraudulent friendships, and the conniving of people trying to live in grand style while on the thin edge of penury does not, as perhaps it might in the work of a more romantic writer, lead young people to throw off the tyranny of their foolish parents; instead, the children become more numbed by the constant movement, the maintenance of surface at the expense of substance. In consequence, the characters take refuge in an interior life contrived out of the rag ends of the only kind of existence they know. Rarely are Gallant’s characters guilty of outrageously immoral actions; rather, their small...
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failings accrete to become an attitude, a way of life that denies personal responsibility while insisting that one is doing everything humanly possible to put things right.
In Gallant’s fiction, few characters make good on the occasional second chance. In her short story “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” in Home Truths, Peter and Sheilah Frazier are middle-class vagabonds lately returned from a posting in Hong Kong, out of which, as usual, they have made no profit, either material or spiritual. Their sole talisman of respectability is Sheilah’s Balenciaga gown, which at times has been their ticket to some of the better parties. Peter has allowed one opportunity after another to slip through his fingers while he waits for fate or chance or old friends to rescue him. He walks through the world in lordly fashion, unable to see himself as an aging do-nothing, a failure. Even a small inheritance becomes merely the occasion for a brief episode of happiness in Paris, while the couple imitate those of more substantial and lasting means. At one point, Sheilah’s beauty and charm bring Peter a job offer with possibilities for making their fortune at last. Without comment, Gallant shows the couple having returned from that episode, sitting in Peter’s sister’s kitchen, as forlorn as ever, their sole emblem of prosperity a steamer trunk upended in the corner. The two sit holding hands across the table; there are no recriminations, no bitterness, only a sweetly elegiac sense of the loss of something undefined. Even this sense of loss becomes transmuted through naïve optimism into dreams that can only lead to disappointments, further failures. So it goes with most of Gallant’s weary protagonists. Hope based on false premises, action inappropriate to the situation, bad decisions, ineffective compromises—these take their toll on the slowly dying, who puzzle over their distantly echoing pain.
Green Water, Green Sky
Although Gallant’s first novel, Green Water, Green Sky, is only 154 pages long, it spans some eleven years in the life of Florence McCarthy Harris, from her fifteenth to her twenty-sixth year. Like most of Gallant’s protagonists, Flor is a halfhearted combatant against her own lingering dissolution. From Venice to Cannes to Paris, Flor drifts, allowing life simply to happen to her. Her mother, Bonnie McCarthy, is a witless pleasure seeker, a woman who strings her days together with no other end in view than making them an adornment, a strand of cheap, gaudy pearls. The novel’s image of Flor comes variously from Bonnie; from Flor’s cousin George Fairlee; from Wishart, her mother’s sexless male companion; and from Bob Harris, Flor’s Jewish husband. Flor stands at the center of this square of mirrors, reflecting only what each gives back as its image of her.
Flor’s one serious attempt to take control of her fate is her marriage to Harris. Even in this, she is neutralized; her mother disapproves, not so much because Harris is a Jew but because he understands how to make money while Bonnie knows only how to spend it. Flor’s attempts to make compromises between the contending forces in her life wear her down until she eventually takes refuge in madness—not the fine, burning madness of a striving consciousness strained beyond its capacity to reconcile the disparate contingencies of existence, but the attenuated surrender of presence in the world of the real.
Its Image on the Mirror
In Its Image on the Mirror, her only work of long fiction set in Canada, Gallant turns her imagination to the effect of time on the lives of the Duncan sisters, Jean and Isobel. The action of the novella moves backward and forward, weaving a fabric of time in which the individual threads become muted, indistinct. Jean is now Jean Price, mother of four. Her sister is married to Alfredo, a Venezuelan doctor. Jean’s life is ordered and sedate; Isobel’s is chaotic and confused. The sisters arrive at their parents’ cottage for a family reunion, and the past is revealed from Jean’s point of view. Less favored than Isobel with beauty, grace, and wit, Jean has made the best of her gifts and is at peace with herself. Isobel has squandered her blessings and lived to see them become a mockery to her.
In her customary method, Gallant describes the surface of things with great precision; interior life is portrayed in relief, the subtle becoming visible by implication. The present is drawn out of Jean’s memories of Montreal during the years of World War II and her humdrum existence of that time. By comparison, those days were Isobel’s best. She led the more exciting life, involved in the shady business of procuring apartments for refugees at exorbitant rents. She always knew where to get cigarettes, whiskey, and nylons. She was in; Jean was out. Isobel’s marriage to a South American doctor had seemed at the time romantic to the staid Duncans. In reality, they now find Alfredo to be short, unattractive, and boorish. The past again catches up with the present, bringing with it its full freight of disappointment. Gallant takes no sides; she is dispassionate, aloof, holding her characters up to the light so that the reader might better inspect them. In the end, Jean’s father sums everything up in his observation that the salt does not taste as salty as it once did.
A Fairly Good Time
Shirley Perrigny, the protagonist of A Fairly Good Time, is a loser. She loses her first husband on their honeymoon, and, by the end of the novel, she is losing her mind; in between, she loses just about everything else that gives meaning to life. She has married again, this time to Philippe, a hack writer of socially aware articles for a second-rate Paris periodical, Le Miroir. (The magazine devotes itself to such burning issues as the analysis of English nursery rhymes as the key to understanding the problems of a developing Africa.) Philippe is everything Shirley is not; he is neat, precise, fastidious, and dim. He is more married to his mother and sister than to his wife. Shirley accepts their combined slights as if she deserves them and finds all her efforts to accommodate Philippe’s family turned against her. At one point, after her husband has left her to return home to his mother’s house to nurse his tender liver, Shirley cannot even get in to see him; his mother reduces their conversation to a whispered dismissal through a barely open door.
Shirley seems always to be confiding her secrets to the enemy. Chief among these is her own mother, who browbeats and humbugs Shirley through her caustic letters. Shirley befriends young Claudie Maurel, who has ordered a restaurant meal without the money to pay for it, and finds herself in the end an inexplicable object of scorn and ridicule to the entire Maurel family. Having forgotten to get money from Philippe before his departure, she goes to borrow some from her neighbor, a Greek lothario. She proceeds to go to bed with him, not because she actively wants to but because she has nothing better to do. Her attempts to help her friend Renata simply add more mismanagement to a life already as confused as her own. In the end, a distraught and disintegrating Shirley, desperate for understanding, mistakes her own image in a mirror for that of a long-sought true companion. She walks joyfully toward the smiling girl.
The Pegnitz Junction
The same spirit of futility informs Gallant’s novella The Pegnitz Junction. Christine and Herbert have gone to Paris to enjoy an affair. Certain things, however, impinge on their fragile bliss: Christine is engaged to a theological student, and Herbert has brought along his little son, Bert. Christine remains faithful to her fiancé in her own way by reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Herbert tries unsuccessfully to nag her into his vision of the liberal pseudoparent. Little Bert enjoys sneaking a nighttime look at the naked, sleeping Christine and in general making a pest of himself.
Gallant employs the return train journey to Strasbourg via Pegnitz as a metaphor for the predictable course of a life along the lines of its own antecedents. Thenarrative is interleaved with the stories of contingent characters. The complaints of an old woman with whom Christine and Herbert share a compartment are rehearsed in her own italicized thoughts. Christine seems to be aware of these, and at times it is uncertain whether she is imagining them or reading the old woman’s mind. At another point, Christine looks out the window at a group of people standing before the gates of an estate, and their story consequently unfolds. When the train is compelled to stop for rerouting, Christine takes notice of an elderly gentleman whose life is told in flashback, again as if occurring in Christine’s consciousness. The trip itself is a series of delays, detours, and disappointments; hot drink vendors have coffee but no cups, sandwich hawkers have no sandwiches, the washrooms are locked, and the conductor orders the windows shut despite the heat. Everyone looks forward to Pegnitz; everyone is certain that a comfortable express train will be waiting there, and that there will be food and drink and a chance to freshen up. Their hopes, like their lives, are futile. No train is waiting, only more confusion, delay, and inconvenience. The entire trip has the quality of Christine’s life: ill planned and dependent on others to give it direction. She is lost and will remain so.
Long fiction is not Gallant’s métier. Her characteristically aloof, precisely rendered sketches of futile lives lose their bite when extended beyond the neat confines of the short story. Nevertheless, her two novels and two novellas repay study, for they work out at length her recurring themes and delve more completely into her recurring categories of dysfunctional characters and families.
