The Cost of Living by Mavis Gallant

Malcolm is convinced he will never have an idea about Bea until he understands her idea of herself. Of course Bea has an idea; what woman hasn't? In her mind's eye she is always advancing, she is walking between lanes of trees on a June day. She is small and slight in her dreams, as she is in life. She advances toward herself, as if half of her were a mirror. In the vision she carries Ruth, her prettiest baby, newly born, or a glass goblet, or a bunch of roses. Whatever she holds must be untouched, fresh, scarcely breathed on.

There's something nice about odds-and-sods collections like this one, which is that the hand of the author is totally absent. There's no thematic arrangement, no meddling in the order of the stories, nor do they capture a particular moment in the author's life: what you get in a collection like The Cost of Living is a snapshot of an author's career from beginning to finish. The collection opens with "Madeline's Birthday," which became, in 1951, Gallant's first published story. Madeline is a New York teenager abandoned by a selfish mother at the home of her sister in Connecticut, where she languishes alongside a German boarder named Paul and her aunt's little girl Allie. Paul wants Madeline to read over his English homework; Allie wants her to braid her hair. For her own part, Madeline is miserable, and dreams of getting away from the cloistered house, where she feels stifled and unwanted. It's not a very good story. Nothing really happens, the larger and deeper conflicts are only gestured at. A careful existence is constructed for the characters beyond the snapshot of the story, but it's hard to believe in that existence. You read "Madeline's Birthday" and think, "Is that it?"

But much of the things that make Gallant's fiction so beguiling are already there, in nascent form. Compare "Madeline's Birthday" to a later masterwork like "Malcolm and Bea" or "The Burgundy Weekend." Both are stories about marriages between people of varying degrees of social toxicity. Practical Malcolm has married Bea, maniacal and headstrong. In "The Burgundy Weekend," Lucie has married Jerome: clever, lazy, proud, flirting shamelessly with the young daughter of his old flame, who they are visiting in the French countryside. But the characters are remarkably rich, so rich, in fact, that the adjectives I've used to describe them hardly seem to capture who they are. Who they are, actually, is a mystery that keeps unfolding, and which may seem different the next time I read the story; not in the sense that they are underdeveloped or vague, but in the way that your initial impressions of real people never tend to be permanent.

What these stories do is have people collide. Some of them, like the married couples, have been colliding for years, sanding each other's edges until neither is fit for any other kind of society, but there are always outsiders, too, whose vantage points make it impossible for them to see inside the relationship. This is especially true in "The Burgundy Weekend," as Lucie's cousin Gilles--a rigid and professionally satisfied doctor who drops them off and picks them up in Burgundy--strains to see what Lucie sees in Jerome, unable to comprehend that Jerome's rudeness is, in Lucie's eyes, a victory for Jerome, who is often too withdrawn to bother. In the stories themselves, nothing much happens: Jerome doesn't sleep with Nadine; the old flame barely registers on the page; there are no murders or flat tires or moments that change everything. But unlike "Madeline's Birthday," you get the sense of whole lives coming to bear on single moments; they are scenes of great pressure in which nothing, in the end, bursts or breaks.

"Every marriage is about something," Malcolm thinks in "Malcom and Bea." "It must have a plot. Sometimes it has a puzzling or incoherent plot. If you saw it acted out, it would bore you. 'Turn it off,' you would say. 'No one I know lives that way.' It has a mood, a setting, a vocabulary, bone structure, a climate.'" Malcolm thinks his way into something true, but the original thought ("Every marriage is about something") is surely incorrect. I don't think you can properly say that any of Gallant's mature stories are about anything. Themes lurk under the surface, including the social inferiority complex of Canadians abroad (one fun detail in "The Burgundy Weekend" is that Lucie is a firm believer in the coming sovereignty of a free Quebec) but the stories aren't really about these things, partially because none of the characters, like most people, can barely agree on what matters at any given moment. This distinguishes Gallant's stories from Alice Munro, her fellow Canadian. While Munro's stories, like Gallant's, are small moments that reveal entire human histories, things happen in them, they are undeniably about something.

All of this makes Gallant's later work sort of spiky and unsatisfying. They resist the kind of pleasing roundness, the sense of a whole story told in short order, for which we often look to short stories. But The Cost of Living is interesting because you can see this quality of Gallant's grow and develop. Halfway between "Madeline's Birthday" and "The Burgundy Weekend" is a story like "Going Ashore," about a young girl on a Mediterranean cruise who yearns to see the fascinating new world she's being offered, but who must deal with her depressive mother, who only booked their passage to meet men. It's "Going Ashore" that might be the most pleasing story in the collection, because it features Gallant at a point where her talent has matured but the story has remained more conventional. By contrast, it's hard to figure out what to do with a story like "The Rejection," a strange, strange conversation between a father and his six year old (who talks like an adult), who decide they don't like each other and don't want to live together. Halfway through the conversation, which takes place in car, we're told that the girl has made a pet of some unidentified reptile, which is sitting at her feet. The story, actually, reminds me of the protagonist of the story "The Cost of Living," who is forced to listen to her actor roommates practicing Beckett plays on the other side of her bedroom wall. "The Rejection" is like Beckett, heard through a wall.

I don't think the stories collected here are as strong as the ones in the actual collections of Gallant's I've read. These kinds of "early and uncollected" compilations rarely are. A few of the later stories probably stand with her best, but a lot of them seem slight, like experiments that got halted halfway through for unsatisfactory results. But I loved getting to see the way one of the most original short fiction writers of the 20th century developed and grew over the course of her career.