Sitting around our kitchen table, an oversized spool, my family made a habit of saying grace before eating. So it happened that one night, fifteen years ago or more, letting a quart of Ragu sink through a bowl of spaghetti, my mom prayed for Irwin Chance.

It was an exquisite prayer—a set of entreaties both earnest and loquacious enough, in fact, to have a uniform effect on the rest of us supplicants. Guiltily, my brother and dad and I opened our eyes, then traded quizzical winces. To our shame, none of us could call Irwin Chance to mind.

Neither, for that matter, could we picture Irwin's brother Everett. My mom, however, eyes still shut, proceeded unfazed, widening her orison to include him, too, until, mid-plea for this reckless young man's happiness, she abruptly quit praying and began, instead, to cackle a retraction of what had been, it turned out, a fairly sustained petition for one of David James Duncan's fictional Brothers K.

Now, I don't recount this story because The Brothers K and The Cost of Living plot either story or sentence in similar ways. Indeed, other reviewers over the years have already done the work of lining up better literary kin for Mavis Gallant, who wrote the short stories collected in The Cost of Living (as well as those collected in Home Truths and The Pegnitz Junction and so on). They link her, for example, to Henry James or Anton Chekhov.

What's more, I am not about to suggest that Gallant's readers have a fair chance of praying for the characters who inhabit her Early and Uncollected Stories. Since, after all, we are slow to pray for people who strike us as vain or snide or petty, and because we do not often heap benisons on the cavalier and the parsimonious, The Cost of Living leaves us little promising fodder for prayer. Gauche or washed-up, the ignoble constitute a majority in Gallant's fictional world, and, even where the writer handles her characters decorously, she is not gentle with them.

Take her delicately barbed depiction of the central character in "Travellers Must Be Content." Gallant writes of him, "Like many spiteful, snobbish, fussy men, or a certain type of murderer, Wishart chose his friends among middle-aged solitary women." No more charitable to female prudes, "The Picnic," its narrator another adept at Gallant's wry neutrality, describes Paula Marshall as having once "broken off an engagement only because she had detected in the young man's eyes a look of sensuous bliss as he ate strawberries and cream." The licentious, for their part, don't come off any better. "Going Ashore," for example, slights Mrs. Ellenger because, though equipped with neither a husband nor brothers, she supplies her daughter with a daisy chain of "uncles." As for Gilles, who "in youth … looked like Julius Caesar" but "in his forties … reminded people of Mussolini," and Frau Stengel, a governess who preserves a photograph of Hitler "between two film magazines," they each have too near an affiliation with dictators to give them easy admission to our prayers.

Nonetheless, the same forgetting that inspired my mom to pray for Irwin Chance takes hold when one reads The Cost of Living, because its characters hover in memory not where they ought—with vivid but distinctly fictional sorts, like Owen Meany—but somewhere nearer, if dimmer. Take the men whom these stories afflict with late middle-age at just the moment the 20th century reaches its own late middle: they inconvenience the reader's memory in the way that a great uncle known mostly by hearsay would. As for Gallant's adolescent girls and neophyte brides, unable to anchor them firmly in our pasts, we could still trick ourselves into mistaking any one of them for some half-remembered girl, now grown, who snubbed us in grade school.

Perhaps Gallant can ghostwrite these characters into our pasts because, even though she protests that she doesn't know where they show up from—see her interview with Jhumpa Lahiri in Granta (No. 106, 2009)—they resemble her own ghosts. To wit: later in the interview, Gallant confesses that once, having long since written a story in which an old man wakes early to watch the Queen crowned, she reread her own fiction and recognized her father. No matter, she said, that "he died some twenty years before" the coronation.

Then again, perhaps it defies explication: the writer's knack for dispatching her characters to the wrong cubby in her readers' recall—a cubby where we store mnemonic clippings about real but insufficiently precious people, from abandoned pen-pals on up.

One way or another, Gallant accomplishes a demi-incarnation in each of these stories. She does not forge flesh, but she presents us with a cuff still warm from chafing a girl's wrist. She does not script lives, but lowers a needle to a secondhand record and transcribes its previous owner's Sunday afternoon.

In short, then, these stories transmit to the reader those feelings that take the longest to accumulate: nostalgia and social claustrophobia and their ilk. We confuse these characters with our older siblings' guitar teachers, sophomores with bad skin and good manners, or with the librarian, kindly if not quite kind, who, for a single summer, lived kitty-corner. And our confusion evinces Gallant's brilliance, which, these early stories would suggest, needed very little time to ripen.

I should also mention, though, that if we forget that the denizens of The Cost of Living belong neither to the living nor the dead, it is no wonder: these stories' characters themselves are stymied by taxonomy. Admittedly, as Jhumpa Lahiri explains in her able introduction to the collection, the savvy reader can muster one category into which the lot fit. She says that these characters are all adrift and, moreover, implies that a fair proportion of The Cost of Living's cast recognizes that the blocking and itineraries set down for them amount to a choreography of drifting. Among these self-conscious itinerants Lahiri numbers the anthology's orphans and divorces, its exiles and bohemians.

Still, these characters set adrift remain at a loss about whether they are loitering or waiting. Part of their misgiving stems from the unfixed plasticity of their world, for the gray of Gallant's Paris "contain[s] every shade in a beam of light," and even the weather in The Cost of Living tends toward chimera. Take it from the first-person narrator of "The Ring," who reports, "The weather bulletin for the day can be one of several: No sun. A high arched yellow sky. Or, creamy clouds, stillness."

More pointedly, though, The Cost of Living teems with characters who find themselves confused about exactly the thing that will puzzle the book's readers. They intuit, these characters, that, for fictional sorts, they possess too much heft (the quotidian lends them weight, and in memory their half-lives linger), but they also realize that they are too insubstantial to lay claim to the actual world.

Such self-consciousness figures in my favorite story from this collection. On the first page of "Autumn Day," we happen upon Cissy, a novice army wife who wears a "Peter Pan collar" and waves to her husband, "Walt, smiling, the way girls do in illustrations." From the beginning, in other words, Cissy is eager to superimpose her biography on a story that Mavis Gallant will not trouble to tell. So we need not wonder at the 19-year-old's beginning her married life in occupied Germany "engulfed," she says, not so much by her husband's embracing her on a railway platform just after World War II as "by the idea of the picture it made."

Later on, still desperate to pull herself into a picturesque fiction, Cissy recounts the moment when a famous American singer quiets the farmhouse where, like the young marrieds, she is renting a room. "The kitchen maids," Cissy says, "were sitting on a bench … , plucking chickens for supper in front of an open brazier. They stopped talking and listened, too, very still, and the yard was like one of those fairy tales where everyone is suddenly frozen for a thousand years."

Gallant, though, permits Cissy neither the solace of fairy stories nor the consolations of living. She settles this character, instead, between fiction and the actual—so that when Cissy says of her marriage "it turned all my poses into real feelings," she could be naming the place where Gallant's prose strands her. For Cissy, like Wishart and Mrs. Ellenger and the rest, belongs to a self-conscious limbo somewhere between "poses" and "real feelings."

And from there, I suspect, she (or one of Gallant's other familiars) will sidle into an obscure district of your memory, for, the cost of living too dear for them, these characters will each, provided a reader's remembrance, turn squatter. And why evict them? Their secret tenancy, if Mavis Gallant's prose is any indication, will either make us shrewder or teach us her sardonic patience.

Jane Zwart teaches literature at Calvin College and writes poems on the sly.

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culturemagazine.
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