“No one is either fully good or fully bad in a Gallant story; her characters are more interesting than that, Gallant is neither a moralist nor a polemicist,” explains Jane Urquhart in the introduction to the Penguin paperback edition of this 1988 collection of stories. In the opening story,
This is one of those strange Paris-soaked stories that I imagine Mavis Gallant writing on an afternoon in a café when she has had too many cups of espresso. When she is in that creative mode where every gesture seen, every syllable overheard, every small intimacy observed between strangers
The novelist who barely disguises the characters he has pulled from reality: here, again, it seems as though we catch a glimpse of another Poche. Now I wonder if Grippes wasn’t forced to camouflage him, after the moment in which Poche queried Grippes about when “What’s-His-Name struggles to prepare
The previous story ends with an imprisonment: “He had got the woman from church to dining room, and he would keep her there trapped, cornered, threatened, watched, until she yielded to Grippes and told her name – as, in his several incarnations, good Poche had always done.” I’m thinking
This story is about Henri Grippes (familiar for readers of this collection, from “A Painful Affair” and “A Flying Start”) and O. Poche, who works in the taxation office. But it’s also about novelist Henri Grippes and his imaginings of O. Poche, who will appear in countless fictions. This
