Across the Bridge

Patricia Morley is professor emeritus of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University and the author of Margaret Laurence: The Long
Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

“Blank beauty” is a curious phrase that Mavis Gallant’s fictional
professor applies to the inhabitants of an isolated archipelago. The
phrase also describes many of the characters in these 11 stories set in
Montreal and Paris. Gallant’s people move through scenes of inspired
ordinariness. Some appear petty and few have intellectual interests, but
Gallant shows the beauty—and occasional horror—that lurks at the
edges of their lives.

In “1933,” the children are kept awake by “change, death,
absence—the adult mysteries.” Their father has just died, and the
Carette family has moved, with horse and cart, to a smaller place in the
same quarter. The carters told Mme Carette “that they had never worked
outside that quarter; they knew only some forty streets of Montreal but
knew them thoroughly.”

The reader comes to know these lives intimately as Gallant’s scalpel
lays bare their furniture, their habits, their aspirations, and their
fears. There is sympathy here, and humor, and the need to know what
makes people tick.

Across the Bridge is vintage Gallant: sometimes eerie, often comic, and
always resonant.