AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINAL
Mavis Gallant's novels are as memorable as her renowned short stories.
Full of wit and psychological poignancy, A Fairly Good Time, here with
Green Water, Green Sky, encapsulates Gallant's unparalleled skill as
a storyteller.
Shirley Perrigny (née Norrington, then briefly Higgins), the heroine of
A Fairly Good Time, is an original. Derided by the Parisians she lives
among and chided by her fellow Canadians, this young widow--recently
remarried to a French journalist named Philippe--is fond of quoting Jane
Austen and Kingsley Amis and of using her myopia as a defense against
social aggression. As the fixed points in Shirley's life begin to
recede--Philippe having apparently though not definitively left--her
freewheeling, makeshift, and self-abnegating ways come to seem an aspect
of devotion to her fellow man. Could this unreliable protagonist be the
unwitting heroine of her own story?
Green Water, Green Sky, Gallant's first novel, is a darker tale of the
fractured family life of Bonnie McCarthy, an American divorcée, and her
daughter, Flor. Uprooted and unmoored, mother and daughter live like
itinerants--in Venice, Cannes, and Paris--glamorous and dependent. With
little hope of escape, Flor attempts to flee this untidy life and the
false notes of her mother.
