In the collection, In Transit, this story’s placement, next to “When We Were Nearly Young” is brilliant. Two experiences of impoverishment: with different settings, life stages, and stakes. But rather than focus on a series of single people, “Better Times” concentrates on a married couple: Susan and Guy. It's
This week, I'm just going to share a few random thoughts about this story. Not Paris. Not Italy. Madrid. (There are so many pretty pictures of Madrid. But this picture makes me think of the women in the story.) Pillar fears she is too old to remarry. She married
Some might be surprised that Mavis Gallant gets children, that she can as easily climb inside their view on the world as she does. I'm thinking about stories like About Geneva and The Rejection. But these children feel apart from the others around them, as though their relationships with
“No one is either fully good or fully bad in a Gallant story; her characters are more interesting than that, Gallant is neither a moralist nor a polemicist,” explains Jane Urquhart in the introduction to the Penguin paperback edition of this 1988 collection of stories. In the opening story,
This is one of those strange Paris-soaked stories that I imagine Mavis Gallant writing on an afternoon in a café when she has had too many cups of espresso. When she is in that creative mode where every gesture seen, every syllable overheard, every small intimacy observed between strangers
