Home Truths by Mavis Gallant

Now, of course there is much to be said on the other side; people who do not display what they feel have practical advantages.  They can go away to be killed as if they didn't min; they can see their sons off to war without a blink.  Their upbringing is intended for a crisis.  When it comes, they behave themselves.  But it is murder in everyday life--truly murder.  The dead of heart and spirit litter the landscape.  Still, keeping a straight face makes life tolerable under stress.  It makes public life tolerable--that is all I am saying; because in private people still got drunk, went after each other with bottles and knives, rang the police to complain that neighbors were sending poison gas over the transom, abandoned infant children and aged parents, wrote letters to newspapers in favor of corporal punishment, with inventive suggestions.  When I came back to Canada that June, at least one thing had been settled; I knew that it was all right for people to laugh and cry and even to make asses of themselves.  I had actually known people like that, had lived with them, and they were fine, mostly--not crazy at all.  That was where a lot of my confidence came from when I began my journey into a new life and a dream past.

It's hard not to be amazed by the short fiction of Mavis Gallant.  I leave every story floored by the clarity of her vision and the persuasiveness of life in them, the richness of detail; nothing ever seems faked or planned.  But that's only part of what makes them so terrific, and it's difficult to find the words to describe what exactly makes them so terrific.  They seem to waver between Edwardian traditionalism and jagged postmodernism.  Sometimes they seem so straightforwardly social-realist in the way they capture, for example, Montreal during World War II; other times they seem like impenetrable knots of consciousness.  (In fact, if these stories didn't hover so reliably around the war I don't know if I'd be able to place them in time at all.)  There always seems to be one character too many, and the themes are entirely elusive.

These stories explore what it means to be Canadian.  Home Truths is split into three sections: "Canadians at Home," "Canadians Abroad," and a cycle of stories about Linnet Muir, a young woman who returns home to Montreal after living in New York for a few years, and which seem like they must be at least partially autobiographical.  Gallant's characters often find themselves stationed at the battle lines of the war of language in Quebec, but in ways that are so understated they seem wholly irrelevant to the stories themselves, like the servant and mistress in "Jorinda and Jorindel" who sit for hours not talking to each other because they refuse to learn English, in the case of one, or French, in the other.  Canadians abroad are always anxious about their French and about not being seen as American.  In one terrific story, "Virus X," a young Canadian woman comes to Alsace to study, and looks anxiously over the border about Germany because her own German heritage is something that, at the time of the war, has always seemed hush-hush.  In these characters you can see, in real time, the Canadian identity emerging from Britishness during the war.

But like I said, this theme is never heavy-handed, and it would be hard to say that's what the stories are about, exactly.  But that must be what it's like to experience a changing cultural identity: it's folded so deeply into the fabric of life that changes fail to announce themselves with much fanfare.  They are also about women--Linnet's stories are all about what happens when, during the war, women come to occupy the jobs once held by men--and even children.  In her most modernist mode, Gallant has a great skill at describing the weird interior world of children, like the little girl who describes her parents this way: "But large, and old, and powerful, they have greater powers: they see through walls, and hear whispered conversations miles away."

Gallant can also be extremely funny, as in this passage from one of the Linnet stories:

"Well, Bolshie," he said to me.  This was a long joke: it had to do with my political views, as he saw them, and it was also a reference to a character in an English comic called "Pip and Squeak" that he and I had both read as children--we'd discussed it once.  Pip and Squeak were a dog and a penguin.  They had a son called Wilfred, who was a rabbit.  Bolshie seemed to be a sort of acquaintance.  He went around carrying one of those round black bombs with a sputtering fuse.  He had a dog, I think--a dog with whiskers.  I had told Mr. Tracy how modern educators were opposed to "Pip and Squeak."  The thought that more than one generation of us had been badly misled by the unusual family unit of dog, penguin, and rabbit.  It was argued that millions of children had grown up believing that if a dog made advances to a female penguin she would produce a rabbit.  "Not a rabbit," said Mr. Tracy reasonably.  "Wilfred."

Some of Home Truths was rereading for me; but I welcomed seeing stories like "The Prodigal Parent" and "In the Tunnel," which I think is sort of a masterpiece, again.  They're just so rich and multifarious, and while I don't think I could explain what seems different this time around, the experience of reading these stories again still had a kind of freshness.  I'm still trying to put my finger on what's so great about them, but I think that impulse--wanting to get inside these stories and figure out what makes them tick--speaks for itself.