There is a magical moment at the close of the title story of Mavis Gallant's most recent short story collection [Across the Bridge] in which the young Parisian female protagonist is unexpectedly washed by a wave of happiness. Reconciled for the first time with her abandoned fiancé, she sees him off on the train, following a meeting in which, little by little, she has seen the possibility of love. Instructed to call her father to fetch her after the rendezvous, she instead takes the winding walk home uphill in an autumn drizzle, conscious of “moving along, as Arnaud was moving on the train. I would be accompanying him during at least part of his journey.”

It is a bewildering gesture, at once ridiculous and intensely lyrical and, like her mother's earlier breaking of her engagement at her behest, in which her wedding invitations are left to float down into the Seine from the top of a bridge, it captures in a fresh and unexpected image the emotional intensity that Gallant almost always chooses to render obliquely in fiction.

These are Chekhovian moments, simultaneously understated and faintly hysterical, but they are made coherent in the fiction by a reading of character against a precisely rendered social landscape. In “Across the Bridge,” Sylvie's own journey involves a retracting of steps in the contemporary French bourgeois version of the arranged marriage, one in which families size each other up, like hawkers and buyers of geese in the marketplace at Christmas, the advantage shifting from one to another with the shortening days of December. Dissuaded from any meaningful pursuit of either education or vocation (though she has some talent as an artist), she is innocent by the standards of her future husband as well as those of her magistrate father, who does not want his daughter to seem too “needy or plain” by doing anything particular in life. Her dreams instead construct idylls of domestic life, first with a fantasy suitor she has met only once, then with the cast-off fiancé, who looks decidedly better the second time around. But these ripples from her unconscious do not escape the constraints of her social class; its rules and regularities inform even the language of her dreams.

Mavis Gallant's own unique formation as an English Protestant Montrealer sent off to a French Catholic convent school at an early age is now widely known. It was an experience that would make her something of a sociological voyeur for all of her life; almost certainly it established her comfortableness in the split linguistic and cultural world she would continue to make her own. For over four decades now she has lived in Paris, in an almost exclusively French daily universe, turning out stories for The New Yorker (she is one of their most frequently published writers) in an English of remarkable purity and elegance.

Curiously, what has rarely been commented on by her readers is her near obsession with the question of language itself, evident in both the fiction and her introduction to Home Truths, where she felt compelled to set the record straight in a parochial nationalist climate that had prematurely disowned her. In fact, Gallant's Quebec beginnings are integral to her whole way of seeing and never more clearly than in her persistent return to themes of language.

In the great symphonic stories of From the Fifteenth District, like “Potter” and “Baum, Gabriel, 1935-()” language is seen as the repository of a whole field of culture and shared history, stubbornly resistant to translation. Here, in “Over the Bridge,” the closed, solipsistic worlds of Sylvie and Arnaud augur poorly for their future life together, for while he seems oblivious to her art, she is merely irritated by his own constant allusions to music and literature, which float over her like a foreign language.

In fact, the protagonist of the story “Kingdom Come” is, himself, a linguist, specializing in the vocabulary and structure of the ancient Saltnatek tongue. Missierna is at a crossroads in his life, having failed to earn either the respect of his academic colleagues or the affection of his children. Predictably, he tries to understand the vagaries of domestic life in terms of the only language he knows. For, if Saltnatek has been like a child to him, he has failed “to observe the patterns of exchange among his real children. … He could have taken them as an independent republic and applied for entry.” Yet, to enter one's own family, too, one needed to fill out forms: “all he would have to understand was the slant of the question.”

Across the Bridge is Gallant's first collection of new short stories since Overhead in the Balloon, an anatomy of European moral decay, whose ironic theological resonances make it a kind of cartoon Wasteland. The adjective is one Gallant would not resist; she has written appreciatively of both the creators of Walter Mitty and Sarah Binks, and once told this writer tongue-in-cheek that her most important influence might have been the thirties' comic strip heroine, Little Orphan Annie.

But there is something of the earlier volume's critique of a soulless consumer society in the closing imagery of “Kingdom Come,” where Missierna brings the Saltnatek children white plastic crash-helmets, fetish objects of the “everlastingness” once promised by European white missionaries:

Some of the village women turned the helmets into flower-pots, but the helmets were airtight, there was no drainage, the plants died. The helmets would never rot. Only the maimed giant snails thrown back into the ocean, could decay. Missierna, the day he resolved that helmets do not die, and so have no hope of resurrection, wondered whether the time had come to stop thinking.

The critique of a contemporary throw-away society (even Missierna's ice cream cone at the end of the story is plastic) hints at a Europe on the way to becoming a vast landfill site. But these fictions trace another level of moral rot in the daily racism and xenophobia that plague the emerging new European community.

The Browningesque “Mlle. Dias de Corta” maps the fears of an inward-looking France in a first person narration that has the feel of a tour-de-force dramatic monologue. Its speaker is a lonely Parisian widow, writing to her former tenant, a Portuguese actress, and vainly soliciting her return after many years. Its gossipy tone uncovers family, but also national secrets.

Weaving in and out of this narrative of foolish longing is the haunting of France by a rising immigrant class whose strained vowels and consonants will always betray them. It is a fictional record of an historical moment whose real-life counterpart is the rise of the National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen (the locale of Marseille in Gallant's story becomes a kind of code for the burgeoning North African population that has been the focus of right-wing French sentiment) as well as the recent Neo-Nazi resurgences in Britain and Germany.

But what are we to make of the comic hilarity of this story, not to mention its sympathetic first-person telling? Something of the answer lies in Gallant's own well-known account of her postwar journey throughout Europe after the first shock-waves of the concentration camp photographs. In the German stories of The Pegnitz Junction, she would later tell interviewers, she had set out to convey the small, daily acts that came to constitute the Fascist moment in history. In Across the Bridge, these more recent fictions convey more than the banality of evil; they refuse moral cliché by even more disjunctively turning it into farce.

As always in Gallant, the main protagonist in these stories is history itself. Readers who have followed her as one of the great chroniclers of the human fallout of World War II and its redrawn borders, will see the special ironies in the new twists and turns of fate inaugurated by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Among other things, Across the Bridge dramatizes the way in which “two generations displaced and dispossessed had come to a stop” with the collapse of Communism in eastern Europe. The title figure of “Forain” is publisher of European intellectuals, notably the Polish Jew Tremski, whose funeral evokes the memories at the centre of the story:

The truth was that the destruction of the Wall—radiant paradigm—had all but demolished Forain. The difference was that Forain could not be hammered to still smaller pieces and sold all over the world. In much the same way Vatican II had reduced to bankruptcy more than one publisher of prayer books in Latin.

“A State of Affairs” describes a moment in which Polish political refugees no longer officially exist. Caught in a limbo between their adopted countries, in which they have remade themselves as intellectuals-in-exile, and the nations of their birth, they remain trapped in the mudslide of history, a sociological genus and species slowly fading into oblivion.

This is familiar Gallant territory in terms of its subject matter, yet there is also a curious sense in which many of these later stories also mark a stylistic return to the manner of Gallant's earliest work, leaving behind some of the psychological complexity of her best middle stories. The grand sweep of history is always there, but in fiction from “Saturday” to “The Moslem Wife,” Gallant is more concerned to trace the language of the unconscious itself, in an often cinematic vocabulary of jumpcut and montage that seldom moves forward in a straight narrative line.

By contrast, many of the stories in Across the Bridge operate more like brilliantly captured friezes and none more explicitly than the opening Quebec sequence, a four-part narrative tableau. The opening is “1933,” a year in which Europe saw the National Socialists rise to power, but which finds the life of the Carette family of Montreal changed in more subtle ways. With the death of her husband, Berthe, her little sister Marie, and their mother move to a small place on Rue Cherrier, only a stone's throw from their old flat over a furniture store in the Rue Saint-Denis. It is a delicately etched portrait, framed by a child's eye point-of-view. The children learn “to say in English ‘I don't understand’ and ‘I don't know’ and ‘No, thank you.’ That was all the English anyone needed between Saint-Denis and Parc Lafontaine.”

The story “The Chosen Husband” is set 16 years later, in the year Mme. Carette comes into a tidy inheritance from her brother-in-law. In fact, it is the Quebec of the Duplessis era and Marie comes home with “a story about Fascist views” that she cannot understand. Theirs is a world circumscribed by the ritual passages of birth, marriage and death, a religious world-view coaxed into shape by Uncle Gildas' version of a God “who kept the dreams of every living person on record, like great rolls of film.” Marie's dream of marriage to her would-be suitor, Louis, returns the story to a moment of unconscious intensity. She imagines herself a nun, naked under a robe of coarse brown wool: “All that kept the dream from sliding into blasphemy and abomination was Marie's entire unacquaintance, awake or asleep, with what could happen next.” In the end, the reluctant Louis promises marriage to avoid being shipped off to war. Something of the frozen tableau effect of the story is summed up in the narrative itself: “Berthe saw the street as if she were bent over the box camera, trying to keep the frame straight.”

In “From Cloud to Cloud,” Louis is dead and his son Raymond traces the return of his Aunt Berthe, an unmarried career woman with a penchant for sleeping with married men. For Raymond's generation, English is the language of commerce, no longer spoken in hushed whispers. It is a split world, engraved with precision on Marie's own burial-stone for her husband: “She ordered a bilingual inscription on the gravestone, because he had spoken English at the office and French to her.” But the new generation, torn from its traditions as well as its language, can only throw up the likes of the feckless Raymond, “homesick for the summer of 1969 for the ease with which he jumped from cloud to cloud.”

By the time of “Florida,” Raymond has staked out a future in the motel industry in “the stretch of Miami known as Little Quebec, from the number of French-Canadians who spend holidays there.” His wife is a skinny, dark-blonde American named Mimi, and he has all but forgotten his own language: “His past had evaporated. It annoyed him to have to speak French. On one of his mother's other visits he had criticised her Montreal accent, said he had heard better French in the streets of Saigon.” The story closes with an image of electricity that sums up the death of a whole way of life: “We've got to make sure we're grounded.”

By setting her last frame in the tawdry tourist gaze of the Florida sun, Gallant provides a reading of an endangered culture that may prove more prescient in its analysis of the final historical antagonists than all the internal language wars of the last few decades.