‘The Cost of Living’ by Mavis Gallant

Mavis Gallant is all about the back story. Look for the source of light in her work as you would in a painting.

Gallant is now 88, and in the stories that make up “The Cost of Living,” the light, the heat, come mainly from two sources: the sooty shadows of World War II and lost childhoods that fade, center stage, into bitter teenage years and slipshod midlife marriages.

That’s not a good start for a generation misplaced and affecting insouciance, la belle indifference. All the cafes, the cruises to Africa, the picnics in France cannot hide the desperate, querulous, lost identities.

Where is my mother? Where is my father? Where do we live? Gallant’s characters, especially the teenagers, don’t ask these questions out loud, but they are burdened by not knowing the answers.

Some of the not knowing is just part of being human, but some is the result of sea changes in the culture, like the vertigo of a woman coming of age between the generations of women who worked in the home and the generations of women who worked outside the home.

“Your girlhood doesn’t vanish overnight,” thinks the lonely young wife in “Autumn Day.” “I know, now, what a lot of wavering goes on, how you step forward and back again. The frontier is invisible; sometimes you’re over without knowing it. I do know that some change began then, at that moment, and I felt an almost unbearable nostalgia for the figure I was leaving behind, the shell of the girl who had got down from the train in September, the pretty girl with all the blue plaid luggage. I could never be that girl again, not entirely. Too much had happened in between.”

The dust of the past settles in the objects, the buildings and furniture and coffee spoons, in these stories. Two young people, setting out on a forced picnic near Cap Martin in “One Morning in May,” are, beyond their knowing, bogged down by history: “The hotels, white and pillared like Grecian ruins, were named for Albert and Victoria and the Empire. Shelled from the sea during the war, they exposed, to the rain and the road, cube-shaped rooms and depressing papered walls that held the sleep of a thousand English spinsters when the pound was still a thing of moment.” Ordinary romance and youthful sensuality elude them both.

The later stories are less languorous. Gallant rushes into a web of characters who intersect in ways no therapist could easily untangle: the matron midlife and the teenage girl poised on the precipice; the insecure mother and her young child who just wants everything to be safe and normal.

It gets harder to identify the sources of light. These stories are agitating for a reader -- contents under pressure -- for how can all these emotions fit in one house, one ship, one rented room?

How can we possibly grow with all this baggage and all these people pressing in on us?

Gallant, who spent her childhood in Montreal and her teenage years in New York, moved to Paris in her 20s, clinging firmly to the lifeline offered by the New Yorker, which published all the stories collected here. She knew firsthand what it was like to cast off one shell, one skin, for another.

The titles of her stories read like posted placards: “Travelers Must Be Content,” “The Cost of Living,” “The Burgundy Weekend.” They are attempts to bring some semblance of order to the uncontainable.

Miraculously, Gallant remains in control, the mother we never had. She sees through the eyes of the children: “It did not enter her head that her mother knew what snow was like.” She sees through the eyes of the teenagers: “I cannot cope with it here,” thinks Madeleine on her 17th birthday. She is a virtuoso of perspective, and this is how she holds together a universe that would otherwise fly apart. It is, after all, a governing principle, in life and fiction: If you can see the world through the eyes of the other, things make a little more sense, for better or worse. It’s self-absorption that ruins and obscures, that renders a character pathetic.

“Like all the ignorant,” thinks Gilles, a survivor, in “The Burgundy Weekend,” “they were unconcerned with knowledge. Like all of the past, they were filled with danger.”

Salter Reynolds is a critic and writer in Los Angeles.