[...] Gallant, one suspects, similarly sees and meets people and then invents what becomes a precise landscape of their world. There is no vanity or self-aggrandizement in her process and the portraits are always tough as well as generous. For instance her satire is sharp in “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street,” and yet she will take us beyond that satire to feel compassion for a character we would never have believed could be sympathetic. The tenderness does not replace or override the earlier portrait, Peter is still pathetic, but now there is that one moment where something happened, where the man's awareness of human nature was suddenly profound.

“I had a great, great fear that I was bent on doing something for which I have no ability, and that took years and years to get rid of... that I was dedicating my life to something I was not fit for,” Gallant once told an interviewer. With some writers greatness emerges out of their very tentativeness, their own uncertainty about how they make stories, or if it is even possible to make them. It results perhaps in every word and line being tested for falseness or complacency. It results too in a kind of testing, self-critical humor that lies within the text. “I am uncertain about every line I write and I am uncertain until I get readers.” With the arrival of that reader, the uncertainty about “an unsafe life” becomes a shared witnessing. This, for a very few writers, becomes the purpose and meaning of a writer's life. “Like every other form of art,” Mavis Gallant has written, “literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death.”

The characters who people Mavis Gallant's Europe are complex and various. The same is true of her protean prose.