Volume 43, Number 16 · October 17, 1996
That's Life
By Gabriele Annan
The Collected Stories
by Mavis Gallant
Random House, 887 pp., $45.00
All the short stories but one in Mavis Gallant's 887-page collection were published in The New Yorker, the first of them in 1953, the last in 1995. They come with a warning issued in the author's characteristically laconic manner: 'Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the cover. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.' But the reviewer can't: so it is difficult for him or her to do full justice to all fifty-two of them, though easy to recognize straight away that some are perfect—meaning that they work perfectly, without waste or overkill, their pathos creeping up stealthily to deliver a fierce pluck at one's feelings. Some are very short; some are novellalength; and some are grouped together in fours and fives around the same central characters.
Review, 1909 words
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