Remembering Mavis

Style, Mavis Gallant once explained, is “the distillation of a lifetime of reading and listening, of selection and rejection.” The remarkable range of genres and media that the celebrated author consumed helps illuminate her aesthetics, her powerful epiphanies, and her inimitable writing. Indeed, it’s difficult to think of other postwar short fiction writers (particularly Canadian ones) whose work has such meandering, elliptical qualities and whose subjects range from small towns in Quebec to Montreal and Paris, from women’s oppression to the fascist mindset.

To mark the centenary of Gallant’s birth, I recently revisited both her work and Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear, a landmark study by Marta Dvořák, a scholar and a confidante of her subject. That 2019 book presents a compelling case that Gallant’s keen visual and aural senses were profoundly shaped by her immersion in art, film, and music. In what Dvořák calls a modernist assimilation of literary...