I first read Mavis Gallant when I was 16, studying French while boarding for the summer in the Woodmont section of Montreal with a dignified Anglophone lady. Over tea each afternoon, this woman complained that “English Quebec” was being overwhelmed by “foreign speakers,” often pausing to address her maid, a Quebecoise, in an accurate but brutally inflected French that seemed to say “I disdain this language but am forced to use it.” One day, while reading Gallant's acutely observant story “The Fenton Child,” I overheard two children chattering together. One spoke French, the other English. But their identical sing-song cadences, composing a kind of patois bred of amity and necessity, made me suddenly realize the multiple significances in Gallant's tale. Like so many of the stories in her Collected Stories, this one was ordered by the theme of communication and, indeed, of communions—failed or achieved—through language.

Gallant's Collected Stories is a 900-page volume that gathers together selections from eight books written from the 1930's to the 1990's. Although each story is memorably distinct, the fictional world Gallant creates has recognizable characteristics that have remained the same throughout six decades. Her characters mostly inhabit European or Canadian cities, where they are for various reasons not quite at home and where perils, great and small, await them—in a false lover's smile, from a parent's treachery, with the disillusionments caused by the bright expectations of Christmas or vacation time or changes in state such as marriage. In this fragile world of shifting accents, polyglot speakers and people with or without passports, language and its uses assume vital importance.

Thus, in that early story “The Fenton Child,” as in her other fictions of Montreal, Paris, Italy, Switzerland and the rest, Gallant seizes on those divisions, hostilities, unions and affections stimulated or even produced by speech. Her story, s fictional character—the plucky teenage Nora, with her French-speaking Catholic mother and English, instinctively Protestant father—has been, she claims, equally “raised in two languages.” That is, like Mavis Gallant herself, Nora has been equally exposed to the two cultural currents that nourish, divide or unite the citizens of Montreal. Vulnerable as Nora is, lied to and kept in the dark (like so many of Gallant's poignant servant girls), she listens for truth in the nuances of French or English diction used by the devious adults who hire her to tend a horribly neglected baby. The baby, son of a mysterious brief liaison between an English father and a French Canadian mother, has been exiled to a foundling hospital and comes “home” at the story's end. But Nora recognizes in his speechless wails the metaphor of lasting alienation.

At the heart of “The Fenton Child” is the silence of the child's mother and foster-mother, a withholding of communication that results from suffering and hatred and in turn creates deprivation and sorrow. This silence that casts out love is, like language in all its forms and deficits, a metaphor in Gallant's oeuvre, one that, as she declares in her Preface, was shaped by her “regional beginnings”—“wholly Quebec,” “English … with a strong current of French,” that “left me with two systems of behavior, divided by syntax and tradition” and steadily enriched and complicated her imagination.

This imagination creates through definition. A dry, almost repellent prosaicism often shapes Gallant's fictive atmospheres, corresponding to her character's limitations. The reader gets used to careful notations of “linoleum-covered floors on which scatter rugs slipped and slid underfoot,” of “white lateral blinds,” and “cardboard suitcase[s] with … rope strap[s].” Such unsentimental realism, however, can also yield to moments of near-poetic description: “The girls took no notice of the Colonel. He was invisible to them, wiped out of being by a curtain pulled over the inner eye.” Sometimes it leads to philosophy: “The illusion of love was a blight imposed by the film industry.” Often, it ushers in the comic: “Her teeth are like leaves in winter”; “Berthe couldn't hand her a teaspoon without receiving a shock, like a small silver bullet. Her sister believed the current was generated by a chemical change that occurred as she flew out of Fort Lauderdale.”

But almost invariably it is by means of language—its uses and disuse, how it is regarded, learned, avoided or even transcended—that we approach Gallant's troubled, travelled but never serenely urbane men, women and children. So the Nora of “The Fenton Child” discovers a man's egoism by his mispronunciation of the English th. “You'd like him,” his shallow lover tells Piotr in the brilliantly specific “Potter,” “he speaks three different languages.” The peculiarity of the Colonel's wife in “New Year's Eve,” suggested by the observation that “she could not read any Russian and would not try,” is summarized by the fact that she has stopped talking to the Colonel altogether after their daughter's death. The Colonel, on the other hand, one of Gallant's sad, well-intentioned strivers, is “able to learn the structure of any language.” That is, in “the heart of [his] isolation,” he tries to understand: people, situations, the past and present, himself.

Though it results in a sort of dulled or sometimes desperate knowledge, urbanity—or at least living in different places—does not often lead to happiness in Gallant's fiction. Those of her heroes who endure preserve the living memory of their roots. This gives them a humanity that sustains them as well as others. Like young Carmela in “The Four Seasons,” “mute and watchful” among “the powerful and strange,” Gallant's heroes instinctively retain the pleasure in nature, in sheer existence, that is proof against the world's blows. Others, like the poor, dying, middle-aged Piotr, are able to find a sort of “slow happiness, like water rising” from giving “tenderness” where it is needed. So—following out the theme of communication and communion—we are told of him that Laurie “could not pronounce ‘Piotr’ and never tried; she said Peter, Prater, Potter, and Otter and he answered to all. Why not? He loved her.”

That both speech and silence can be forms of love in these Collected Stories seems itself metaphoric of the supreme value of words to a writer as clear-eyed and assured as Mavis Gallant. in the capaciousness of this volume, to which the author invites us to turn as to a house that can be entered and left as we like, there is a largesse of sympathy that recalls both fluent speech and compassionate silence.