Mavis Gallant

Thursday

Tomoé Hill

The life and legacy of Mavis Gallant, an American in Paris

"God help the English if she ever starts on us,” remarked Jonathan Keates in a blurb for Mavis Gallant’s Paris Notebooks. Far from being the ubiquitous “love letter” to a city, the essays and reviews within revealed people and their lives as they were, not as ideals. What Keates didn’t realize was that in Gallant’s short stories, everyone, regardless of nationality or gender, was fair game for her sometimes vicious, often dryly funny, always unblinking gaze. When she died in 2014, aged ninety-one, an obituary noted her profound irritation at her critics’ focus on The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant: “Everyone who has reviewed it so far mentions exile.

Gallant

Tuesday

Mia Levitin

Scenes from domestic life: After the Funeral, by Tessa Hadley, reviewed

From our UK edition

The cover image of Tessa Hadley’s fourth short story collection is Gerhard Richter’s ‘Betty’ (1988), a portrait of the artist’s daughter facing away from the viewer. It’s an apt choice for Hadley’s work, which turns on the fundamental unknowability of human beings. The titular tale, about a widowed mother and her two daughters confronting reduced circumstances, is loosely inspired by Mavis Gallant’s story ‘1933’. Its climax, which pulls off the feat of being both shocking and inevitable, is a testament to Hadley’s skill as a storyteller. Some of the stories’ incidents are entirely internal: in ‘Cecilia Awakened’, a teenaged girl on a family holiday in Florence wakes up ‘inside the wrong skin’, suddenly aware of her parents’ shortcomings.