Montreal Stories

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IN A CHARACTERISTIC mingling of modesty and fierce pride, Mavis Gallant has said that “one of the hardest things in the world is to describe what happened next.” It’s hard because of the value- and emotion-laden nature, not just of memory, but of human consciousness itself. Though nothing truly escapes us, memory and mind from the moment of our birth are notoriously, almost hopelessly, selective, elliptical, and inventive. And memory and mind, for expression, perhaps for their very existence, depend upon language — than which, of course, there is no more evasive and deceptive a medium. Now in her eighties, Gallant has spent a long lifetime doing that hardest thing, describing what happened next, in stories that are not only moving and powerful but true to memory and mind. Born and raised bilingual in French-speaking Quebec and residing most of her adult life in France, Gallant chose to write in English, and in it fewer than a handful of living story writers are her equal: William Trevor, and her countrywoman Alice Munro, perhaps, and — since the death of Eudora Welty — no American that I can think of.

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