Book Review: ‘The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant’

Roving Eye is the Book Review’s essay series on international writers of the past whose works warrant a fresh look, often in light of reissued, updated or newly translated editions of their books.

When Jean-Paul Sartre held a news conference in Montreal in 1946, a young journalist for The Standard, Mavis Gallant, was there in her eye-catching red coat. Afterward, they spoke about Sartre’s existential novel “Nausea,” which Gallant admired. Years later, she remembered asking him “stupid questions about writing.” But he was kind to her — “what used to be called a sweet guy.” Gallant vowed then that when she got to be in Sartre’s position, she would be nice to aspiring writers too.

Four years later, 28 and divorced, she quit the newspaper and, with no financial security, moved alone to Europe to begin the process of becoming a generous, venerated author. Mostly she was chasing that great existential concern — freedom — the major project and treasure of her life, the basis for her art. A new omnibus edited by Garth Risk Hallberg, THE UNCOLLECTED STORIES OF MAVIS GALLANT (New York Review Books, 590 pp., paperback, $22.95), includes an early story that is forgettable except for its ending with a Gallant mantra. A man in a foreign, rainy city returns to his rented room and thinks: “Whatever happens I am free.”

Her work soon became unforgettable. She wrote two novels, a play and essays on life in her adopted Paris, but the short story was her imagination’s home. Its regular inhabitants were displaced people: immigrants, orphans, tourists, marital escapees, refugees, characters in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught out in unseasonal weather. They haunt boardinghouses, dilapidated hotels, tacky resorts, train carriages. Good luck getting a hot bath. Over five decades, The New Yorker published 116 of these deadpan, icy stories mined with moments of brutal humor.

I first heard of Gallant, who died in 2014, from a YouTube video nine years ago, listening to Fran Lebowitz declare her “the best short-story writer in English.” I thought: Wait, who? Lebowitz reserves puffs exclusively for cigarettes, so I sat up. Since then, I’ve added my own equally bold claim: Gallant is the genius absurdist of the 20th century.