You can’t keep a good book down. I first read Mavis Gallant’s debut novel, Green Water, Green Sky, in 1995, when it was reissued more than three decades after its first publication in 1959. Now, another three decades later, here it comes again, like a comet.
Gallant was a Canadian supremo of the short story, like her countrywoman Alice Munro. She had 116 stories published in The New Yorker between 1951 and 1995, putting her among its ten most prolific contributors. But she was a Canadian in exile, having moved in her late twenties from Montreal to Paris, where she lived until her death in 2014 at the age of 91, and many of her characters are similarly displaced.
Green Water, Green Sky — one of only two novels Gallant wrote — is a good example of her art and a great place to start. In its short extent it manages to cover Venice, Cannes and Paris, and four phases in the lives of its central characters: the American expat Bonnie McCarthy and her daughter Flor, as well as Flor’s husband, Bob Harris, and her cousin Georgie.
Flor and Georgie “met summers, two and three years apart, so that every time it was like meeting a different person”. Georgie, “tomato-pink, fair-haired, deeply injured, rather fat”, is seven years younger than Flor and worships his cousin, placing particular value on a glass bead he kept from a necklace Flor broke years earlier. But when they meet again, in Venice, she dismisses their intimacy. “Because of her, the twin pictures, love and resentment, were always there, one reflecting the other, water under sky.”
This opening chapter is like a perfect story from which the rest of the book blossoms, asking: what could this lead to? Why did it happen? And what sort of person would do such a thing? In the rest of the book we find out. The story skips forward to when Flor, living in Paris, is married and suffering from some unnameable ailment. Gallant skewers her characters like insects on a pin, the narrative swooping from one to another. There is something ridiculous, she implies, about Flor’s self-described malaise. “My teeth ache,” Flor reports. “It’s something that only happens in France and it’s called rage des dents.” Meanwhile, Bonnie wonders why Flor has settled for someone as hopeless as Bob Harris — “she only comes to life for slobs” — without reflecting on whether her inability to let Flor go might have something to do with it.
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The story jumps back in time and forward to an ominous future, but the plot is not really the point. Green Water, Green Sky is really an interlinked quartet of stories, each of which adds depth to the others, bringing us closer to who these odd people really are. They can communicate without talking and talk without communicating: “Nothing was said, nothing was said about anything, and the silence beat about them like waves.” It is funny, vivid and very sad.
Gallant often visited the same characters over and over in her short fiction, many of which are available in her hefty Collected Stories. Highlights include her sequence about the Carette family, whose daughters Berthe and Marie (like Flor) never seem to find the right man. “Mr Macfarlane had left a lewd poem on [Berthe’s] desk, then a note of apology, then a poem even worse than the first.” Or try the misadventures of a character called Henri Grippes, who published his novel the day before the Paris riots of 1968 and with “stoic gloom … watched students flinging the whole of the first edition onto a bonfire blazing as high as second-storey windows”.
There is barely a line in any Mavis Gallant story that doesn’t sing with wit, insight or just rhythmic pleasure to the ear. But this might also explain why she is not better known: you need to take your time. You can’t skim or slack. Attention must be paid. Yet she continued to deliver throughout her career. One late story, Kingdom Come, opens, winningly: “After having spent 24 years in the Republic of Saltnatek, where he established the first modern university [and] recorded the vocabulary and structure of the Saltnatek tongue, […] Dr Domini Missierna returned to Europe to find that nobody cared.”
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In 1996 Gallant wrote, “I still do not know what impels anyone of sound mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist.” But we should be glad she did, and that she made the decision to travel to Europe and live by her pen. When asked in interviews to explain or analyse her stories, she would shudder. Instead she spelt out her one simple principle, one that many writers could learn from. “I want a story to be perfectly clear and I don’t want it to be boring. C’est tout.”
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Green Water, Green Sky by Mavis Gallant (Daunt £9.99 pp176). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
