O’Connor’s religiosity is inescapable. When she was studying at Iowa, she attended morning mass daily. In her prayer journal, she clearly requests spiritual intervention to guide her craft. While I do not gravitate towards the meditative passages and debates in her letters about her Catholicism – and often skim
“To take up residence in the mind of Mavis Gallant, as one does in reading her stories, is a privilege and delight,” writes Phyllis Rose, to begin her review of Overhead in a Balloon in the March 18, 1987 issue of The New Yorker. She speaks of Gallant’s ability
When readers meet Gabriel it is 1960 and he is twenty-five years old, fresh from having served in the French army for twenty months in Algeria. “War had never been declared. What Gabriel had engaged in was a long tactical exercise for which there was no compensation except experience.”
Here, Eric inhabits a room like Carmela’s in “The Four Seasons”, in the Unwins’ home: the kind “assigned to someone’s hapless, helpless paid companions, who would have marvelled at the thought of its lending shelter to a dying man”. And Eric is dying, like the father in “The End
In Miss Bianca and the Bridesmaid (1972), the action shifts closer to home, when a young girl disappears the day before a family wedding is to take place. The girl is the niece of the Ambassadress, who is ever-grateful for the assistance and companionship Miss Bianca provides to the
