Paris as Prison : ACROSS THE BRIDGE: Ten Short Stories, <i> By Mavis Gallant (Random House: $18: 176 pp.)</i>

The publicity material for this elegant collection of short stories reminds us that “Mavis Gallant has published more fiction in the New Yorker than any other writer--more than 100 stories to date.”

That’s the kind of statement that cuts both ways: Obviously these tales are going to be witty, elegant and urbane, but in another sense many New Yorker stories are generic: Well-heeled men and women “lose their way” in ways that are easy for well-heeled readers of the New Yorker to understand.

Almost by definition, these stories lack adventure and plot. If things started happening in them, they wouldn’t be New Yorker stories; the characters wouldn’t be boxed in by the circumstances of their lives. The appeal of these narratives must lie in the exquisitely perceived details--linoleum waxed to a repellent shine, a swarm of wasps attacking melon slices in early afternoon sunlight, inventories of furniture that suggest, in their remote heaviness, an entire, enclosed life: “You promised not to damage or remove without permission a double bed, two pillows, and a bolster, a pair of blankets, a beige satin spread with a hand-knotted silk fringe, a chaise lounge of the same color, a wardrobe and a dozen hangers, a marble fireplace (ornamental), two sets of lined curtains and two of ecru voile, a walnut bureau with four drawers, two framed etchings of cathedrals (Reims and Chartres) . . . “ and so on, for seven more printed lines.

Mavis Gallant is famous for writing about Paris and six of these stories are set in that great city; but this is not the high living metropolis of American fantasy life. Gallant’s Paris is slow-moving, over-furnished, stagnant. In “Dede,” an excruciatingly tense lunch-party unfolds. Members of the upper-middle class discuss the decline of France while feasting on “partridges in a nest of shredded cabbage.” They chew through course after course, ending with “a plum tart, purple and gold, caramelized all over its surface, and a bowl of cream.” The grown-ups drone on, while the younger brother of the hostess, Dede, behaves strangely. He’s an arsonist, actually, and no one knows quite what to do with him. And yet the hostess, his older sister, cares only for her brother “ . . . Pride is not the same as helpless love. The person she loved best, in that particular way was Dede.”

Again and again, 11 times and in 11 different ways, individual love, aspiration, affection, are crushed by the objects of life, and by the mill-grinding crush of societies where the individual is utterly disregarded, given no room to breathe or to move. The “Paris” in these stories is an ecru prison, monochromatic, a place of desperate loneliness.

In “Forain,” named for the French publisher of a set of unsuccessful East European emigres, Blaise Forain busies himself going to funerals of his steadily dying clients. Forain wears the clothes of the departed, negotiates ever smaller advances for their books and acknowledges to himself that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the whole reason for the continued publishing of his little exiled flock has evaporated. Nevertheless, his exiles remain in Paris, squabbling, backbiting, dying--dying mostly of loneliness--and Forain must attend them to the end.

In “A State of Affairs,” another exile, a learned Polish scholar named Mr. Wroblewski, lives out the end of his days in a small Paris flat. His wife is afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease, and he has absolutely no one left to talk to. He is tormented by a hundred small humiliations.

Not all of these stories are Parisien . The first four, and the last, are set in Montreal, where it is the French who are exiled in a country that still seems strange and unwelcoming to them. In “1933” a very young widow and her two daughters, Berthe and Marie, must move from their comfortable apartment to a much smaller one. The young widow had worked on her own trousseau since the time she was 11; now, at the age of 27, her life as an adult has ended. She trains her two girls “not to lie, or point, or gobble their food, or show their legs above the knee, or leave fingerprints on the window panes, or handle the parlour curtains--the slightest touch could crease the lace. . . .”

In the next story, Berthe has grown up and works in an office, knowing at least something about the world, but young Marie must be married off, much as her own mother had been, to a “suitable” French Canadian. The gentleman in question doesn’t want to get married, neither does Marie. But the Korean War presents itself, and to avoid the draft, the gentleman proposes.

Presto! In the next, the gentleman is dead, Marie is widowed like her mother and her much-loved son runs away to Florida. How fast life travels! How quickly death sneaks up on us! How many dirty tricks our destiny plays on us! No wonder less evolved parts of our dispositions hold on to our couches, our walnut bureaus, our sets of flatware and cutlery. A couch can never betray us, a satin bedspread can never run away.

Each of these 11 stories is beautifully written and imagined. That is the pleasure they give to the reader, and that pleasure is genuine and well earned by the author. But the sweetness of this prose is offset by the sorrow of the characters. Can life really be as painful as Mavis Gallant suggests? Is the only viable position for an intelligent person a state of loneliness, alienation, depression, a heartbreak carefully controlled and concealed behind five-course meals and mountains of furniture? Is it moronic and the mark of a Philestine to express or feel joy?

Gallant is a lovely writer, but her answers to the last three rhetorical questions would be an unqualified yes. Whether or not you’ll want to pick up this book depends on how your feel about life itself: its limitations, its moments of transcendence.