“Although an epidemic of haunting, widely reported, spread through the Fifteenth District of our city last summer, only three acceptable complaints were lodged with the police.” Having read about half of Mavis Gallant’s short stories now, and never yet having met a ghost, imagine my surprise at finding three
When readers meet Gabriel it is 1960 and he is twenty-five years old, fresh from having served in the French army for twenty months in Algeria. “War had never been declared. What Gabriel had engaged in was a long tactical exercise for which there was no compensation except experience.”
Just four weeks ago, I was commenting on the first story in From the Fifteenth District, a novella, and noting how many key elements of Mavis Gallant’s storytelling were present in “The Four Seasons”. In “The Latehomecomer”, not only do some familiar elements resurface, but an actual character reappears.
Here, Eric inhabits a room like Carmela’s in “The Four Seasons”, in the Unwins’ home: the kind “assigned to someone’s hapless, helpless paid companions, who would have marvelled at the thought of its lending shelter to a dying man”. And Eric is dying, like the father in “The End
So many of Mavis Gallant’s characters inhabit between spaces. Netta, too. Which is strange, because so many of Mavis Gallant’s other itinerant women are staying in hotels, but Netta is running one. And she is just as between as the rest of them. Once she said yes and, then,
