Across the Bridge

Mavis Gallant

pri 2011 · New Canadian Library

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In Across the Bridge, four of the eleven stories are connected, following the fortunes of the Carette family in Montreal. In “1933,” their widowed mother teaches Berthe and Marie to deny that she was a seamstress and to say instead that she was “clever with her hands.” In “The Chosen Husband,” the luckless suitor Louis has to undergo the front-parlour scrutiny of Marie’s mother and sister: “But then Louis began to cough and had to cover his mouth. He was in trouble with a caramel. The Carettes looked away, so that he could strangle unobserved.” We then follow their marriage, the birth of Raymond, and Raymond’s flight from his mother and aunt to his eventual role as a motel manager in Florida. 

With the exception of “The Fenton Child,” an eerie story set in postwar Montreal, the other stories take place in the Paris Mavis Gallant knows so well. “Across the Bridge,” the title story, begins with the narrator’s mother throwing her reluctant daughter’s wedding invitations into the Seine: “I watched the envelopes fall in a slow shower and land on the dark water and float apart. Strangers leaned on the parapet and stared, too, but nobody spoke.”

This is a superb collection of stories by a writer at the top of her form.

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MAVIS GALLANT was born in Quebec, Canada, in 1922. She began her career as a journalist, before switching to fiction in 1950. She moved to Paris a decade later, and spent the rest of her life there. She published 116 stories in The New Yorker over the course of her career; additionally, she wrote two novels, a play, and a collection of essays. A recipient of the 2002 Rea Award for the Short Story, Gallant was also awarded the 2004 PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement and the Governor General's Literary Award for English-language fiction. She was named Officer of the Order of Canada in 1981, and in 1993 she was promoted to Companion of the Order. She died in 2014.