Mavis Gallant's extraordinary mastery of the short story remains insufficiently recognized. She may be the best writer of stories since the early-1950s prime of John Cheever, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor, and even in such august company, her work is sui generis. Gallant's short fiction refines the art of the story even as it expands the boundaries of what a story can be. Above and beyond that, however, it constitutes a striking, almost avant-garde reduction. To read her is to discover something about the very nature of story: how for better or worse life is caught up in it, and how on the page that common predicament can come to life.
Unforgettable ... She can deliver top-line disgust, the existentialist’s moldy bread and butter, showing how life curdles when it seems to lack any sane form ... With Gallant at the wheel, telling jokes over her shoulder, I enjoy being aesthetically carsick. The exhaust fuming off her pages, reeking of life’s absurdities and pathos, is invigorating. She blurs her reader’s sight, but in that blur are images of real, moving people.
What makes Hallberg’s editorial choices especially valuable not just to the reader but also to the writer is his decision to include three of Gallant’s earliest stories and a comprehensive bibliography. This means that turning to the book’s last page isn’t so much reaching the end of Gallant as receiving an invitation to go on from there ... These 44 stories trace Gallant’s progress as a writer ruthless in her self-scrutiny. Her prose grabs us by the throat, allowing us to see beyond our own miserly limitations.
