The rise and fall of Mavis Gallant

Thanks to Charles May for usual smart postings, this time on the death, at 91, of Mavis Gallant. She's a writer whose fame has kind of diminished over the years - she's often compared w/ her Canadian near-contemporary Alice Munro, so it's particularly striking to see Alice the Great winning a much-deserved Nobel Prize this year and Gallant passing with only a little bit of attention. If you transport yourself back to the 1980s or 90s, you'll see these two side by side as two of the darlings of The New Yorker - in fact, Gallant maybe more so than the rising star of Munro. It was a time when the short story was for a brief shining moment the pre-eminent literary form - everyone was living under the vast shadow of Raymond Carver, and it seemed every new young writer, women in particular, debuted with a story collection: Minot, Phillips, Mason - there was a sense that the novel was too long a form that readers wanted their fiction in more a more immediate form, like standup comedy compared with a comic drama, say. Gallant seemed very much a voice in this era - writing generally about expatriates settled in Europe, usually Paris - and it's odd but I can barely remember any one single story of hers with great clarity (although I do recall the famous opening scene of a woman throwing wedding invitations off the bridge and into the Seine). Why is that? Munro's stories stay in the mind more because they are jazzier, more form-breaking, more vast in scope - Gallant's were tight and well-crafted and thoughtful, but a little distant and dry. Her reputation, I think, has also been hurt by her long silence - I don't think she's written or published much over the past 20 years - and though older novels can remain in circulation to a degree yesterday's short-story collection is almost always remaindered. She probably needed one single great story or collection to mark her place, a guiding star that could lead readers to her constellation, but she doesn't have that - "just" a lifetime collection of really fine fiction that was published, in its day, by the preeminent magazine in the world. The New Yorker made her an international figure, and now, perhaps, she's being rediscovered by some as I understand the NYRB house is reissuing some of her works in their fine and daring paperback series. Salut!