The End of the World and Other Stories by Mavis Gallant

She lugged her suitcase as far as the road and sat down beside it.  Overnight a pocket of liquid the size of a lemon had formed near the anklebone.  Her father would say it was all her own fault again.  Why  Was it Sarah's fault that she had all this loving capital to invest?  What was she supposed to do with it?  Even if she always ended up sitting outside a gate somewhere, was she any the worse for it?  The only thing wrong now was the pain she felt, not of her ankle but in her stomach.  her stomach felt as if it was filled up with old oyster shells.  Yes, a load of old, ugly, used-up shells was what she had for stuffing.  She had to take care not to breathe too deeply, because the shells scratched.  In her research for Professor Downcast she had learned that one could be alcoholic, crippled, afraid of dying and of being poor, and she knew these things waited for everyone, even Sarah; but nothing had warned her that one day she would not be loved.  That was the meaning of "less privileged."  There was no other.

Walter, the protagonist of "An Unmarried Man's Summer" lives rent-free in a bungalow in Nice with his manservant Angelo.  He knows that one day, when the owners of the house retire, he'll be forced to move somewhere, do something else, but that day is fifteen years down the road.  His sister visits and forces him to see how deeply happy Angelo is--that, despite the poverty from which he comes, the life of endless vacation he shares with Walter comes at the cost of separation from his family, from human companionship.

In "The Accident," a woman is on a long honeymoon on the Italian Riviera with her husband when he is killed in a freak accident, hit on a bicycle by a car door.  Before his death, she reflects on the nature of their vacation:  "So real life, the grey noon with no limits, had not yet begun.  I distrusted real life, for I knew nothing about it.  It was the middle-aged world without feeling, where no one was loved."  After the accident, she stays in Italy, getting a job as a translator for a pharmacy.  You can't exactly say that she's on an infinite vacation--there's that job, after all--but like Walter, she's stuck in some kind of world that is eternally foreign and exotic to her, using it to fend of the "grey noon with no limits" that is life at home in Canada.

Gallant presents, over and over again, a kind of arrested development incarnated in the vacation that won't end.  Her characters are typically Canadians in Europe, as Gallant herself was, living as an ex-pat in Paris.  I picked the book up at a bookstore in Edmonton on my most recent vacation, and let me tell you, that feeling of the "grey noon," captured perfectly the feeling of letdown after vacation was over.  In "In the Tunnel," a young woman impulsively agrees to move in with a dashing English ex-officer for a month, again on the Riviera.  He and his neighbors prove to be churlish, prickly, difficult to understand; their conversation vacillates between accommodation and hostility that seem very real.  But the lesson for Sarah is not that the experience might have been better if the officer had been kinder, but that enacting our fantasies means inevitably rupturing them.

Almost every one of these stories offers a variation on  these themes, sometimes an inversion.  In "New Year's Eve," the Riviera is traded for the Bolshoi theater in Moscow, and follows the lines of thought of three people who are incapable of really communicating with or understanding each other.  In "The Other Paris," it's a woman who gets engaged to a fellow Canadian in Paris in a misguided attempt to force the romantic Paris of her dreams to become reality.  In "About Geneva," it's a pair of children who return to their mother after having visited their estranged father, and whose scattered impressions fail to tell the mother what she really wants to know "about Geneva":

But how can they be trusted, the children's mother thought.  Which of them can one believe?  "Perhaps," she said to Colin, "one day, you can tell me more about Geneva?"

"Yes," he said perplexed.

But, really, she doubted it; nothing had come back form the trip but her own feelings of longing and envy, the longing and envy she felt at night, seeing, at a crossroad or over a bridge, the lighted windows of a train sweep by.  Her children had nothing to tell her.  Perhaps, as she said, one day Colin would say something, produce the image of Geneva, tell her about the lake, the boats, the swans, and why her husband had left her.  Perhaps he could tell her, but, really, she doubted it.  And, already, so did he.

Even the story least like these, "My Heart is Broken," has something in common with them.  In a remote road-construction camp in northern Quebec, an older woman is talking with a younger woman, both of whose husbands work for the camp.  Over the course of the conversation, we come to understand that the younger woman has been raped by a worker at the camp.  But the rape is less a threat to the cohesion of the small, faraway community than the knowledge of the rape:

"Don't say who it was," said Mrs. Thompson.  "We don't any of us need to know."

"We were just talking, and he got sore all of a sudden and grabbed my arm."

"Don't say the name!" Mrs. Thompson cried.

As an image of rape culture, it's sharp and black-hearted.  But even this Quebec camp, like Nice, like the Riviera, seems like a collective illusion that is precariously balanced, and must constantly be defended against the forces of the "grey noon" of the real world.

Gallant's stories are strange; they seem to violate some of the traditional practices of short story writing.  They're circuitous, choked with detail, and refuse to present logical progressions of character.  Conversations are knotty and difficult to follow.  Comparisons to Gallant's fellow Canadian Alice Munro seem natural, but though I think Munro is many times more complex than she gets credit for, her stories have a satisfying completeness that Gallant rejects.  They resemble more than anything ten pages plucked randomly from the middle of a novel.  I found myself wondering what next? when each was over, but that's part of the endless vacation, I guess: there are no resolutions.