Reading Mavis Gallant by Janice Kulyk Keefer (review)

164 LEITERS IN CANADA 1989 realizing how different the modem landscape would be from his memories of the 1920s. In another essay he compares the Guy Fawkes Day bonfires and fireworks, recollected from boyhood, with North American Ballowe'en, though he explains that the latter is actually more traditional: the English holiday celebrates the failure of Fawkes's attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament, and is an early example of the politicizing of a religious festival. Autobiographical essays are interspersedwith travel essays and critical essays; some pieces offer a mixture of two or all three. Sometimes Woodcock travels in the steps of a previous writer and compares the experiences; he visits Robert Louis Stevenson's Samos, and is even accorded the title the natives originally gave Stevenson: Tusitala, the Teller of Tales. In China, Woodcock's literary companion is Li Po, who provides the model for a birthday celebration of drinking rice spirit in the moonlight. Patrick Leigh Fermor is the inspiration for winter travel in Europe, and Woodcock is eloquent about the benefits of staying in the greatcapitals outside the touristseason: the relatively few visitors become honorary citizens, and enjoy the cities' full cultural life to a much greater extent than the summer crowds. Woodcock uses the essayform to take the reader outofthe mainstream, off the beaten track. He illuminates the minor writer, the neglected text, the long-forgotten memory, the out-of-the-way place, the odd moment. What is the secret of his success with topics that in other hands might seem mere curiosities? To me it is his ability to find rich significance in seemingly peripheral details and seemingly unimportant experiences. This attentiveness, this noticing of what most people miss or dismiss, gives this collection its unifying quality as well as its apposite title: Powers of Observation. (GRAHAM GOOD) Janice Kulyk Keefer. Reading Mavis Gallant Oxford University Press. xii, 231. $14.95 paper The first comment that needs to be made about this excellentcritical study is that its title is crucial. Janice Kulyk Keefer is not primarily concerned with providing scholarly information about Mavis Gallant and her work (though she does that), or with adding to our overstocked bookshelves of high-flown academic analysis. Instead, she focuses on the difficulties and challenges and rewards of reading Gallant's fiction with the kind of sensitive intelligence that will reveal its finer points. In her preface, she quotes with justified approval Gallant's own satisfaction that Elizabeth Bowen's writing 'had not been strung up on the gibbet of methodology,' and that the biography she is reviewing 'is free from critical jargon and HUMANITIES 165 cant.' Keefer takes the hint and concentr~tes on 'the pleasures of the text' in a highly intelligent, admirably disciplined, and healthily untheoretical way. She writes not for fellow academics or even for parasitic university students but for educated people who read as a civilized matter of course without thought of any official credit, for those who have made her acquaintance in the New Yorker rather than in the classroom. (This may be another way of saying that Keefer is a thoroughly responsible critic.) I cannot imagine a better guide for the investigation of Gallant's unique qualities as a writer of fiction. After some thoughtful and provocative introductory chapters on more general issues, Keefer isolates three of Gallant's prime concerns- they are too important and all-pervasive to be called themes- in her central chapters entitled 'The Prison of Childhood,' 'The World of Women,' and 'The Angel of History.' But this is only the basic structure for a more ambitious inquiry. She knows that Gallant's work 'is overwhelmingly more than the sumofits "themes,"' and spends much ofher space establishing the precise nature ofGallant's style (in the broadest sense of that term). It may well be an acquired taste- I always think ofthis style as having the attractively bitterquality ofa dry martiniand Keefer's success derives in part from the fact that she shares much of Gallant's stylistic virtuosity. Thus she discusses Gallant in her own terms and with her gift for enlightening images or similes. At one point Keefer detects 'an ironic scorch to the fabric...