Across the Bridge [Hardcover]

Mavis Gallant (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 31, 1993

A collection of ten stories by the author of In Transit blends subtle nuances, an ironic eye for detail, and rich simplicity as she writes about the illusions that individuals create and destroy amid life's complexities. 10,000 first printing.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The 11 stories in this collection demonstrate Gallant's capacious knowledge of human nature, refracted through her ironic views of the battle of the sexes and of the conflict between generations. Penetrating and insightful, these tales reflect the sensibilities of conservative Catholic Montrealers and Parisians coping with the crises of modern life. The husbands and fathers portrayed here prefer their women placid, pretty and without intellectual ambition. And with few exceptions the women are compliant, either out of a general inbred dreaminess or a pathetic lack of opportunity or gumption. The most captivating characters are women who evade this fate. Berthe Carette, whose family is the subject of four interlocked stories, defies the church, remains unwed and independent and sleeps with married men. (Her purposefully helpless, blandly demanding sister Marie also gets her own way, however.) Bright, perceptive Nora Abbott, the teenaged protagonist of "The Fenton Child," cleverly deals with the Montreal-Anglo disdain of French-speaking natives, and also learns how to handle her scheming father. The French heroine of the title story, romantic, naive Sylvie, regrets her moment of rebellion until she finds the "true life that was almost ready to let me in." Gallant's sharp tongue cuts through churchly cant, moral hypocrisy and the myth of male superiority; her finely honed prose captures the small details that illuminate a life. This collection will add to her deserved reputation as a superb practitioner of her craft.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Gallant's elegant, witty tales of place and person weave together small domestic moments described in careful detail. Her characters are either on the fringes of Parisian or Canadian gentility, or are Eastern European immigrants, well out of it; their choices of dress, address, words, restaurants, even the dishes served to dinner guests, reveal the subtleties of unalterable social status that circumscribe their lives. They care greatly and elaborately about appearances: sisters Berthe and Marie, who are featured in several of the stories, are cautioned by their widowed seamstress mother never to reveal her occupation but to say only that she was "clever with her hands." In the title piece, a perceptive but passive young woman moves not unhappily toward a probably loveless marriage. Gallant beautifully structures her stories (most of which appeared in The New Yorker ) and depicts characters and situations with insight and irony. Recommended for most collections.
- Eleanor Mitchell, Arizona State Univ. West, Phoenix
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 198 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (August 31, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679422137
• ISBN-13: 978-0679422136
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,381,893 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You must remember this....., March 2, 2002

By 

Dianne Foster "Di" (USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Across the Bridge (Paperback)

My favorite of the 11 short stories in ACROSS THE BRIDGE is the euponymous tale set in Paris sometime around the mid-20th Century. One is never sure of the exact date of one of Mavis Gallant's stories as they are so timeless. In "Across the Bridge" the heroine is engaged to be married, and at the last moment persuades her parents to call off the ceremony. The picture Gallant paints of white wedding invitations floating away in the Seine is quite startling and could have taken place at any time over the past 150 years.

Gallant's writing has been compared with that of Alice Munro with some justification. Both authors write short stories, sometimes linked to each other (as are several of the tales in ACROSS THE BRIDGE), frequently told from a woman's point of view, about family matters -- engagements, enduring and/or barely endured marriages, children wanted and unwanted, money worries, daughters whisked off to nunneries or other out-of-the-way place, unrequieted love, revenge -- and faith or lack of it.
Both women are Canadian authors, though Munro tends to write about the non-Gallic mostly Scots-descent Canadians whereas Gallant's stories are most often about French Canadienne or Parisienne protagonists. Munro and Gallant are both frequently published in the New Yorker Magazine, and most of the stories in ACROSS THE BRIDGE appeared in the New Yorker before being added to this collection.

Each of the tales told by Gallant this book is about rejection and acceptance. For example, in "A State of Affairs" the refugee status of a very elderly Polish Jew living in Paris following a WWII Nazi prison camp internment becomes imperiled when 'normal' relations are restored between Poland and France. In "The Fenton Child" a baby is both wanted and unwanted.

Gallant's writing is literate and compelling, and I find myself reflective after reading one of her stories. She does not feel a need to tie up loose ends or make the world seem better or worse than it really is. She has a gift for arousing empathy. Often, it seems to me, her stories include a relatively positive note. In "Across the Bridge" for example, at one point the young narrator says "It was a small secret, insignificant, but it belonged to the true life that was almost ready to let me in. And so it did, and yes, it made me happy."