Mavis Gallant’s Magic Tricks | The New Yorker

For almost thirty years, I have been teaching literature to college undergraduates and graduate students. And every semester—except on those rare occasions when the subject of the class has been too narrowly focussed to include Mavis Gallant’s fiction—I have taught at least one, sometimes two, of her stories.

This is partly for selfish reasons. For me, teaching involves a great deal of reading aloud. And there are few writers whose work gives me so much pleasure to read to a group. What a joy it is to hear, translated into my own voice and rhythms, the crispness and grace of Gallant’s sentences; the sparkle of her wit; the accuracy of her descriptions. How satisfying to pretend, if only for a few moments, that the sensible, capacious, no-nonsense humanity of her vision of the world is my own.

In addition, I feel a kind of messianic zeal, which I share with many writers and readers, to make sure that Gallant’s work continues to be read, admired—and loved. One can speculate about the possible reasons why she is not more universally known. Though her work appeared regularly and for decades (from the nineteen-fifties until the mid-nineteen-nineties) in The New Yorker, where it attracted a loyal and enthusiastic readership, Gallant, who died in 2014, never became quite as popular, as widely recognized, or as frequently celebrated as any number of writers who published as regularly in the magazine during roughly the same period of time.

Perhaps the simplest explanation is that she was a Canadian short-story writer, born in Montreal, in 1922, living in Paris, where she worked initially as a journalist, writing in English, and publishing in the United States. It was hard for any country to claim her, to make her a public figure (which she would have resisted) or for readers to classify her as one thing or another. Things (including books) are always easier to describe when they are like something else, and it was Gallant’s great strength and less-than-great public-relations problem that her work is so unlike anyone else’s. What one extracts from what (little) Gallant has said about her life is the central fact of her wanting to do what she wanted, which was to write.

Finally, the classes I teach (and this has evolved over time) are centered on close reading, on examining every word, every sentence, considering word choice, diction, tone, subtext, and so forth. Most, if not all, serious fiction rewards this, but some writers reward it more than others. And there are some writers who provide evidence for—proof of—what I find myself telling students: some fiction simply cannot be understood—on the simplest level of plot and character—unless you pay attention. Mavis Gallant has a technical daring and an innovative freedom that, as in a painting by Velázquez, remain hidden unless you look closely, pay attention, and at the same time manage to surrender to the mystery of art, to the fact that it cannot be reduced, summarized, or made to seem like anything but itself. She places a huge amount of faith in her reader’s intelligence, a faith which demands and rewards careful reading. But she’s also very funny, and a great deal of fun. Her stories are full of satisfying reverses and breathtaking passages of dazzlingly precise, virtuosic writing.

One such story is “Mlle. Dias de Corta,” which appears among the stories of the eighties and nineties in a new reissue of “The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant,” which was first published in 1996.

In the story, Gallant does a kind of magic trick, introducing us to a fairly unpleasant elderly Parisienne: xenophobic, passive-aggressive, self-involved, sly—let’s say a considerable range of unattractive personality traits. The story is framed as a letter addressed (though the letter can never be sent, because the narrator has no idea about what might be the correct address to send it to) to the eponymous young would-be actress who boarded with the narrator and her son, decades before, and with whom the narrator’s son had a brief, disastrous affair. By the time we have reached the final sentences, our heart is breaking for this woman with whom, in all likelihood, we would prefer not to spend five minutes—unless we managed to persuade ourselves that she is (as indeed she is) a member of a vanishing breed, a subject of anthropological interest. It is necessary to read closely, to understand what this woman is saying underneath what she appears to be saying: what she wants and needs to say, what she cannot say, and why she so often chooses to say something else entirely. On our second or third or fourth reading, aspects of the story emerge, complications we may have missed earlier. For example, the exact nature of the narrator’s worries about her son, Robert, the chilliness of their relationship. The way in which his affair with the young actress has divided them and brought them together may be opaque to the reader who skims rapidly through the text. Similarly, the history of the narrator’s marriage and the complexities of her worrisome financial situation can be apprehended only if we slow down and attempt to fathom what is being said—and not said.

One can open the volume of Gallant’s stories at random and find a passage such as this one, in “The Moslem Wife,” the first in the collection. A woman named Netta reflects on the beginning of her childhood fascination with her cousin Jack, with whom she later falls in love, and eventually marries:

Netta curtsied to her aunt and uncle. Her eyes were on Jack. She could not read yet, though she could sift and classify attitudes. She drew near him, sucking her lower lip, her hands behind her back. For the first time she was conscious of the beauty of another child. He was younger than Netta, imprisoned in a portable-fence arrangement in which he moved tirelessly, crabwise, hanging on a barrier he could easily have climbed. . . . She heard the adults laugh and say that Jack looked like a prizefighter. She walked around his prison, staring, and the blue-eyed fighter stared back.