[In the following review, Betts examines the unsentimental tone and perspective of Across the Bridge.]

Aristotle describes the “great-souled man” as one who, moving others, is himself unmoved. In these 11 stories that make up her 11th book, [Across the Bridge,] Canadian native Mavis Gallant writes with the skill of a great-souled woman whose calm narrative style seems to keep her, like her character Blaise Forain, “at a remove” from painful events so understated that the reader's heart may already have broken before he felt it crack.

Gallant is not, of course, “unmoved” so much as unsentimental. Her protagonists are mostly decent people in Paris and Montreal doing the best they can and not doing very well. Like Tremski, an unread and unappreciated author, their windows look out on “the sort of view that prisoners see.” In another story, a suitor being checked out by his prospective mother-in-law coughs on a candy while the Carette family looks away “so that he could strangle unobserved.” A three-month-old child is first seen “in a long room filled with cots and undesired infants” by a nanny who cannot make the child's family love him and must tell herself in the end, “I'll try to remember him. It's the best I can do.” A man sent to St. Mâlo to rest visits the grave of Chateaubriand on which Sartre had urinated and thinks “of other violations and of the filth that can wash over private lives.”

The stories may sound grim, but they contain unexpected radiance. Gallant's distinctive prose causes some of these break-through moments. “There was a wife-and-children air to him.” “She was warm and friendly and made him think of a large buttercup.” “I had never been inside a Protestant church before. It was spare and bare and somehow useful-looking, like a large broom closet.” But the characters trying to muddle through their desperate lives shine brighter through their circumstances.

My favorite story, “Forain,” contains minimum plot but maximum character. Though Forain feels abstracted during his friend's funeral Mass, he behaves in his daily life like a clumsy Christian with a not noticeably blessed vocation. As publisher of struggling literary writers behind what was then the Iron Curtain, he has struggled to bring art and culture to readers who prefer cheap entertainment. His profits have been small; when he is publicly honored for his achievements he longs to have the money be spent on manuscripts rather than squandered on dinner and wine. At Tremski's funeral, in the moment the mourners turn to their neighbors to exchange the kiss of peace, he finds “unfocused, symbolized love positively terrifying.” Afterwards, he overtips the inept waiter, overpays the irritable cab driver, summons an ambulance for an injured old woman “in an attempt to promote Cartesian order over Slavic frenzy” and generally behaves like a Good Samaritan in spite of himself.

Sometimes witty, often detached, Mavis Gallant in these masterful stories generates pity and terror—but below the surface, between the lines, inside the reader.