Green Water, Green Sky

 

Green Water, Green Sky / Mavis Gallant
Toronto: MacMillan, 1983, c1959.
154 p.

This early work, the second novel by Canadian writer Mavis Gallant, who spent most of her writing life in Paris, doesn't reflect the brilliance of her later work. It feels to me like the early paintings of Emily Carr, very good but heavily reflective of the European tradition, not quite in the artist's own distinctive voice yet. It was published in bits in the New Yorker, then in full in the US in 1959, but only received a Canadian edition in 1983, in the Laurentian Library edition shown here. 

Gallant has written many gloriously perfect short stories, and those later collections are where I'd recommend a reader new to her should start. This little novel is really for Gallant completists. 

The plot is recognizable as something that Henry James or maybe Edith Wharton might have put together. There's a group of Americans floating around Europe, mainly Italy and France, following the social season. The main focus is on Bonnie, a woman separated from her husband, and her daughter Flor. When younger, Flor was vibrant and prickly, with lots of potential to find a good husband and secure them a spot in the the social register. 

However, after the opening the story jumps ahead. Now Flor is indeed married, but if anything it has made her more intense and unhappy. Her young cousin George, all grown up from the first section of the book, is visiting Paris and makes a stop to see Flor, who lives with her husband and mother as well. His young, self-satisfied narrative perspective gives us a bit of an outsiders view of the set-up, as well as colouring in some of the family history that has led to Bonnie and Flor settling in Europe. This section really gives us a sense of how both women think, and how incompatible their world views really are.

The third part of the book takes us away from Paris for a bit, following both Bonnie and a male companion (ie: freeloader) who travel to the same spot -- the way they are both hangers-on to other, richer people's homes and lifestyles reminds me of Harold Skimpole in Dickens' Bleak House; they are old-fashioned spongers. This part of the story does feel a bit like it's an older way of living - this story is set in the 50s but the older generation (Bonnie) is stuck in the past and the ways of doing things she's always known. Flor, meanwhile, is having a very modern mid-century breakdown.

The final section of the book shows us the results of this jarring incompatibility between Flor, her mother, her husband, and the modern world. This is a brief novel, one outlining the ways that people try to stay tethered to the world but don't always succeed. There is some fine, precise writing, which is to expected from Gallant. It does feel like an older style of novel, though, and maybe wouldn't have been published if Gallant had not already had a solid reputation. It feels like it was an early work, written while she was young and new to the European milieu, following on the lines of many North America-to-Europe transplants before her. But it was published in 1983, after she'd already had success with her polished stories. So it's interesting, and if you are a fan or someone who really likes to read everything by an author once you discover them, do read it. But if not, try From the Fifteenth District, Home Truths, In Transit, or any of the newer collections of stories, first.