Across the Bridge

Marvis Gallant is one of the world's fiction writers, and ACROSS THE BRIDGE is a masterful collection of short-stories. Four of the eleven stories are connected, following the fortunes of the Carette family in Montreal. In "1933" their widowed mother teaches Berthe and Marie to deny that she is a seamstress and to say instead that she was "clever with her hands." In "The Chosen Husband" the luckless suitor Louis has to undergo the front-parlour scrutiny of Marie's mother and sister. The reader then follows his marriage, the birth of Raymond, and Raymond's flight from his mother and aunt to his eventual role as a motel manager in Florida. With the exception of "the Fenton Child," an eerier story set in postwar Montreal, all the other stories take place in the Paris Mavis Gallant knows so well. First published in 1993, ACROSS THE BRIDGE is a superb collection of stories by a writer at the top of her form.