A Gallant Storyteller : THE COLLECTED STORIES OF MAVIS GALLANT.<i> By Mavis Gallant (Random House: $45, 887 pp.)</i>

Some writers have all the luck: They possess a name so intrinsically right, so appropriate to the quality of fiction they create, that their signature alone demands serious literary attention.

Mavis Gallant’s name is intimately connected with the august imprimatur of the New Yorker--as well it should be, since she has been published consistently in that magazine’s pages for more than 40 years. Her stories occupy a particular niche: Finely honed, deeply psychological, precise and compact in their language, they examine with an astute, objective eye the peculiar situations of characters who exist outside the expectations of their contexts: English-speaking Quebecois, foreigners in France, Canadians in Florida, artists who have failed to attain their potential.

Her protagonists and narrators are forever peripheral to their surroundings, though they themselves may not realize this fact--that’s but one of the qualities that makes them so interesting. Gallant observes a category of persons who might be termed “lay ethnologists,” men and women who are either caught up with their ultimately futile attempts to comprehend the rules of the game or who have, in fatigue or exasperation, abandoned the quest and settled for permanent estrangement.

“The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant” is a hefty doorstop of a volume, the kind of book one might take along to a desert island (where, in fact, I read it this past August). Arranged by the epoch of their content rather than by the chronological date of their publication, the pieces collectively form a kind of social history, a gallery of portraits that veer from impatient and passionate youth toward an increasingly mature, acquiescing perspective. Over the course of its hundreds of carefully culled pages (and Gallant, in her eloquent introduction, informs us that these are by no means all of her published works, just the ones that fit this book’s conceptual schema), infatuations cool, angers adjust, ambitions are tempered with hard-won wisdom.

Some critics suggest that we writers each have but one archetypal story to tell, one central abiding question that we need to solve through our imaginations, and that we continue to approach it over and over from different angles and in varying voices. If this is true for Gallant, her canvass, like her output, is inordinately large and rich, making the search for some common denominator a daunting task.

She writes heartbreaking stories about the impossibility of enduring love. She writes stories of confusions, rumors, ultimate disappointments, about the indignity of aging, the saving graces of patience and forgiveness. She writes about the unattainable lifelong dreams inspired by a single dared moment of passion--the aftershocks and the long, slow decline into bitterness or, worse, neutrality. She explores the justifications people make to themselves, the excuses that constitute a skewed form of courage, of will over fact.

War and its aftermath are central to the lives of many of her characters. The wreck of nations forms, on the personal level, the defining experience, directly or indirectly, of dazed Europeans and North Americans. It is the source of their primary losses and sorrows, the reference point that can be cited as the event when their safe and promising worlds began to go wrong.

Writing in what might be termed a direct and reportorial style (Gallant started out as a journalist), her sentences can suddenly explode into Nabokovian insight with a line that nails a character to a page. This technique--a lulling, quiet prose suffused with detail, unparenthesized anecdotes and asides that initially don’t seem to lead anywhere very significant--accumulates depth and weight with its steady pull. We come to recognize that for many of her men and women it is the minuscule facts of retained memory that act as proof that they’ve been alive at all.

Inventories of actions, objects, recriminations and small triumphs are maintained with fine and fierce exactitude, as though the person in whose recollection they reside is composed of, rather than the ultimate instigator of, their happening. Artists, forgotten by a once-doting or about-to-dote public, dwell among the detritus of their unfinished work. Missed opportunities constitute experience just as surely as actual accomplishments or failures. Nothing, Gallant suggests again and again, is wasted or irrelevant in the course of a life--or, conversely at her most bleak, everything is.

Organized into nine groupings (sets of decades: “The Thirties and Forties,” “The Fifties,” “The Sixties,” “The Seventies,” “The Eighties and Nineties”; cycles that involve related or developing characters: “Linnet Muir,” “The Carette Sisters,” “Edouard, Juliette, Lena,” “Henri Grippes”), the 52 stories Gallant has chosen are of varying length and ambition, ranging from the short, incisive sketches of “Kingdom Come” (1986), “April Fish” (1968) and “From the Fifteenth District” (1978), to virtual novellas, dense in meaning and resonance, such as “The Moslem Wife” (1976), “Potter” (1977) and “The Pegnitz Junction” (1973). It is no exaggeration to say--and I do so somewhat in awe and envy--that amid all this variety there is struck not one false note, penned not one ill-fitting or excess word. Gallant makes stories the way another kind of master craftsperson builds violins, honing and polishing until only the purest tones are allowed to emanate.

Of particular interest are her excursions into related story sequences. The section titled “Linnet Muir,” for instance, contains five stories that feel every bit as autobiographical (“faction,” as some have called it) as the later novels of Philip Roth or the recent work of Paul Theroux. Do these bravely introspective memoirs cast light on Gallant’s own life, her own attitude toward parental love and betrayal, her gained wisdom about the nature of survival? Or are they instead flights of imagination (sprung perhaps from “real” experience) so astutely captured, so artfully and yet offhandedly presented that they seem to carry a truth rooted in blood rather than brain? In the end, of course, it matters little, for they--as well as the intricate and evolving relationships of “The Carette Sisters”--stand wholly and magnificently on their own, whatever their instigating genre.

“The Collected Stories” stymies a reviewer’s natural impulses in two respects: In the first place, it’s impossible to choose a favorite story because the bounty offered is simply so disparate that it defies relative comparison. It sounds absurd to say, as one does with one’s children, “they’re all my favorite,” and yet the temptation to do so is overwhelming. Similarly, it is frustrating and probably disrespectful to tease out for quotation individual or especially brilliant passages. Gallant’s language is so seamless (a much overused word in popular criticism but one which aptly applies in this case) that to lift an extract from its proper place within the body is to do even the most startling juxtaposition of words an injustice. Mona Lisa’s smile, when deprived of the rest of her facial expression, looks bland.

That said, I can’t resist the urge to tease with a few phrases. Gallant can be wickedly ironic. In “Varieties of Exile” (1976), a young and idealistic character speaks of her naive infatuation with political exiles in Canada: “I was entirely at home with foreigners, which is not surprising--the home was all in my head. They were the only people I had met until now who believed, as I did, that our victory would prove to be a tidal wave nothing could stop. What I did not know was how many of them hoped and expected their neighbors to be washed away too.”

She can be poignantly perceptive. In “In Youth Is Pleasure” (1975) she writes, “. . . At 18 all that came to me was thankfulness that I had been correct about one thing throughout my youth, which I now considered ended: Time had been on my side, faithfully, and unless you died you were always bound to escape.” She can be caustic; in “Voices Lost in the Snow” (1976), Gallant throws away a devastating line: “She was the daughter of such a sensible, truthful, pessimistic woman--pessimistic in the way women become when they settle for what actually exists.”

And she can be inexorably moving. In “Potter” (1977), a character, reacting to disillusionment, observes a telling photograph: “A casual happiness suffused this picture. Piotr was looking at people who did not know or really understand how lucky they were. A sun risen for the lovers alone shone in at the window behind them and made Laurie’s hair white and sparkling, like light seen through an icicle. Those were Piotr’s immediate, orderly thoughts. He sensed the particular eroticism of the clothed man and the naked girl and only then felt the shock, like a door battered in. The door collapsed, and Piotr saw whatever he had been dreading since he had dared to fall in love--solitude, cruelty, the loneliness of dying. All of that.”

At 887 pages, “The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant” is far too short.