A Fairly Good Time by Mavis Gallant

All her private dialogues were furnished with scraps of prose recited out of context, like the disparate chairs, carpets and lamps adrift in her apartment. She carried her notions of conversation into active life and felt as if she had been invited to act in a play without having been told the name of it. No one had ever mentioned who the author was or if the action was supposed to be sad or hilarious. She came on stage wondering whether the plot was gently falling apart or rushing onward toward a solution. Cues went unheeded and unrecognized, and she annoyed the other players by bringing in lines from any other piece she happened to recall.

Shirley Perrigny--formerly Shirley Norrington, then Shirley Higgins--is a Canadian living in Paris. Her first husband, Peter, died on their honeymoon in Italy, leaving her to drift toward France, where she married a journalist named Philippe. Philippe has left her, it seems, or half-left her; he has disappeared. Excuses seem to proliferate from the shadows--he's on assignment, he's visiting his family, he's sick with hepatitis--but each one is buttressed with the caveat that he's not to be contacted. Left adrift, Shirley searches for a sense of identity in the wake of these personal disasters. She makes friends with a desperate young mother named Claudie, and becomes reluctantly ingratiated with her family; Claudie sees in the slightly older Shirley someone who has her life together, which we know is the opposite of the truth. But Shirley's chief personality trait seems to be her need to care for others, which may be, as Philippe and others see it, a kind of self-abnegation that prevents Shirley from really becoming.

A Fairly Good Time is an example of a small but recognizable mid-century micro-genre: the North American girl in Europe. Mostly, as in Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado, it's an American girl, but the Canadian Shirley is constantly being taken for an American anyway. Philippe, and many of the other locals, find many reasons to look down on Shirley; they take her personal idiosyncrasies to be examples of North American uncouthness, and they elevate small differences to the level of barbarism. It's really not a book that makes the French come out very well. But even among these, Shirley finds ways to  connect with people, even despite herself, and perhaps it is her outsider's perspective that makes her so invaluable to an unsettled soul like Claudie. Shirley, too, is adrift, but her adriftness has taken her far away from home, something that the too-young mother Claudie can only see and admire.

I've only read Gallant's short stories, and I love them, but I think that here, in a novel, the strengths that make her such a good short story writer work against her. Gallant's stories are rich and overfilled; they effortlessly give a sense of whole worlds that exist outside of the margins of the page. As a novel, it feels overstuffed; characters who might have made a strong singular impression, like Shirley's malicious landlady Madame Roux, end up overextended and obscure. Interestingly, I recognized the story of Shirley's first husband's death as being cribbed from one of her stories that, if I recall correctly, is anthologized in two of the collections I read. In that story, too, the young window drifts into the first harbor she can find, a lover and his family who turn out to be somewhat sinister.

This NYRB edition of A Fairly Good Time includes another of Gallant's novels (maybe the only other one, but I'm not looking it up; don't quote me), Green Water, Green Sky. This novel--really, a novella--is about Flor, another Canadian in Europe (as Gallant herself was), undergoing the slow dissolution of her mental health. Flor's story is told mostly through the eyes of the people at the edges of her life, some intimate and others quite incidental: her mother, her Jewish husband Bob Harris, her cousin George, an artist and hanger-on named Wishart. This method is strange, and it felt to me like the novel keeps us from looking directly at Flor. It's too disparate, too imbalanced, to work with any kind of wholeness or singleness, though perhaps the fragmentation is much the point. And yet, a long scene where Flor, abandoned by her mother and others, cloisters herself within her flat and begins to break down completely, shows Gallant, like nothing else in either novel does, at the height of her talents.