What a delight to be invited to the #1970Club party and to bring Mavis Gallant as my guest. The quintessential short story writer published her novel A Fairly Good Time in 1970.

The first chapter is a letter from Shirley Perrigny’s mother, a slippery few pages that spill from her pen and conclude by marvelling that, before Shirley was born, her presence had been mistaken for a tumour.

Later, Shirley’s advice, at twenty-six years old, to another young woman struggling with her mother’s expectations, reveals her sense of alienation: “When you are unhappy anywhere with anyone, family or not, you walk away and never look back.”

So we know, from the start, that there’s a hint of malignancy in Shirley’s family relationships.

In the next chapter, we learn that her husband is more attached to Geneviève than Shirley, his wife. And all the time he’s been spending with Geneviève, ostensibly reading her manuscript, hasn’t been dedicated to editorial work.

Shirley tries to avoid this reality, partly because she’s vulnerable to being judged, partly because she doesn’t want to believe it. “The less you know, the less can happen,” she declares. The mere possibility is painful. There’s a view of an ice creamery’s window, with GLACES appearing from two perspectives, one upside-down and the other in reverse, that demonstrates how disorienting all this has been.

Gallant’s prose feels almost manic, at times, with Shirley’s desperate need to cover up what’s going on with Philippe. At other times, Gallant’s prose is sharp and pointed, the sentences taut, reflecting Shirley’s desire to control the narrative.

And it all takes place in a darker side of Paris (recalling Gallant’s first collection, The Other Side of Paris). Where the left bank of the Seine is a “waste country of filling stations and shut, blind-looking factories” with a “refuse and oil and an oil-stained pigeon” floating atop the river—a Paris is filled with “urine-smelling staircases”, filled not with tourists but people living far from home, just getting by—often refugees. (You could read it for this alone, the socio-political texture and complexity.)

Shirley views her Canadian parents as eccentric and says they can be “judged but never displaced.” She, however, can be displaced. Generally, this is the story of Shirley’s displacement; specifically, it’s the story of her work as an interpreter in a department store, awkward meals with in-laws, reading Le Miroir on the Métro, and moving through spaces where the smell of curry mixes with the smell of disinfectant.

But there is also such intelligence and attention-to-detail, that it’s never overwhelmingly bleak. There are moments of fierce determination, insistence on truth, that afford readers shelter from the storm that Shirley currently inhabits.

“You’ve messed up two marriages now,” said Mrs. Castle. “Why are you always in such a hurry to get married, I wonder? You seem to get married in a rush, then you rush the other way.”
“Pete died, Mrs. Castle.”
“So he did. Now his mother was American.”
“He didn’t die of that,” said Shirley, seeing herself in miniature in the other woman’s glasses.

You can feel the simmer of irony behind the dialogue, but Gallant also doesn’t miss the opportunity to remind us that Shirley feels small, that she is unusually aware of how others are viewing her, at this juncture. Even two thirds into the novel, she’s still unable to confront the reality of her husband’s decision, arguing with her landlady: “I’m not a tourist. I’m not somebody who keeps moving on. I’m somebody’s wife.”

From start to stop, readers are immersed in “Shirley’s calendar of time” in Gallant’s novel and her interior experience of this period of instability. But Gallant’s skill and experience offer readers a safe place from which to observe.

If you’re new to Gallant, check our Jhumpa Lahiri’s Q&A with here on Vimeo or the 1956 documentary on Telescope, for a peek into her daily life in Paris.

And if you want to meet a younger Shirley, she also appears in “The Accident”, first published in The New Yorker, later collected in The End of the World and Other Stories. (Towards the end of the novel, time shifts as Shirley reflects more on her first marriage and how it impacted her expectations of life with Philippe.)

Thanks to hosts Simon and Kaggsy for hosting and encouraging me to read the last Gallant unread in my collection. (There are links to my chronological read through of her short stories here.) Check out the posts/links on both hosts’ pages to see what else was published in 1970 and remark on what you read below if you’re participating too.