The important point about Mavis Gallant is that she writes magnificent short fiction. In Across the Bridge, she is at her best: the book seems destined to join The Pegnitz Junction (1973), From the Fifteenth District (1979), and Home Truths (1981) on the short list of Gallant's major collections. Nine of these 11 stories originally appeared in The New Yorker, with which Gallant has had a long association, and some will be familiar from their inclusion in the annual Best American Short Stories anthologies. Gallant's credentials are as impressive as her talents, yet the admiration she receives is strikingly restrained. In Reading Mavis Gallant (1989), Janice Kulyk Keefer notes that Gallant “is a writer who must be savoured in small doses: reading the entirety of her fiction can be like downing a bottle of the finest vinegar.” Though I enjoyed reading this book, I followed Keefer's advice.

These stories are primarily set in Montreal and Paris; the mordant irony is constant. As always, Gallant has a keen eye for the details that illuminate the undirected lives of so many of her characters. In “Across the Bridge,” for instance, the Castelli family first cancels then attempts to renew the engagement of their daughter Sylvie to Arnaud Pons. So the two meet for a “fixed-price meal” in a cheap restaurant, complete with hard-boiled eggs, liver, and poor service. This splendid scene culminates in a dessert that is ordered because it “was included, and it would have been a waste of money to skip a course.” When Sylvie, who narrates, is unable to eat her flan because it arrives covered in parsley flakes, Arnaud “began to eat the flan, slowly, using my spoon. Each time he put the spoon in his mouth I said to myself, He must love me. Otherwise it would be disgusting.” To the reader, it is disgusting, and Arnaud's thrift is more apparent than his affection. As the story ends, we are convinced that Sylvie is both vacuous and happy. Gallant is harsher on the narrator of “Mlle. Dias de Corta,” a story in the form of a letter from a woman to her former boarder. Every line reveals the pettiness and bigotry of the letter writer, especially her belief in a secret report predicting that “by the year 2025 Asians will have taken over a third of Paris, Arabs and Africans three-quarters, and unskilled European immigrants two-fifths.”

Gallant treats the citizens of Montreal with similar irony. Both the opening sequence of four stories on the Carette family and the concluding, previously unpublished “The Fenton Child” are set in Montreal. In the characters of Berthe in the sequence and Nora in the concluding story, Gallant creates two of her most memorable and substantial women.

I must not omit the remarkably funny “Kingdom Come,” which sustains the humor of the opening sentence:

After having spent twenty-four years in the Republic of Saltnatek, where he established the first modern university, recorded the vocabulary and structure of the Saltnatek tongue, and discovered in a remote village an allophylian language unknown except to its speakers, Dr. Dominic Missierna returned to Europe to find that nobody cared.

It is a story that improves with rereading—but then so do all the other stories in this book.