Across the Bridge - Mavis Gallant

In Across the Bridge,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 was 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: "But then Louis began to
cough and had to cover his mouth. He was in trouble with a caramel. The Carettes
looked away, so that he could strangle unobserved." We then follow their 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 eerie story set
in postwar Montreal, the other stories take place in the Paris Mavis Gallant knows
so well. "Across the Bridge," the title story, begins with the narrator's mother
throwing her reluctant daughter's wedding invitations into the Seine: "I watched
the envelopes fall in a slow shower and land on the dark water and float apart. Strangers
leaned on the parapet and stared, too, but nobody spoke."

This is a superb collection
of stories by a writer at the top of her form.