Uncover A Fairly Good Time: With Green Water, Green Sky Illustrated By Mavis Gallant Available In Physical Edition

to A Fairly Good Time, Will set Green Water, Green Sky aside for another time,

Superficially, the main character and setting are similar to The Dud Avocado, which I enjoyed for its humor and because it was fastmoving.
Both feature twentysomething, somewhat ditzy expats

living in postwar Paris and having a series of misadventures, But this novel's ditzy expat is more dissatisfied and unsettled, and mostly misunderstood and unappreciated by those around her, so rather than riding along for her I Love Lucystyle comedic mishaps, the story takes on a lonely and despairing pitch.
I do not think this novel was ever intended as a lighthearted romp, So certainly don't expect that, But I'm not sure that nagging unmet and unrealistic expectation is what did this novel in for me,

As another reviewer points out, the main character is very disorganized in thought, actions, everything, That events in her story unfold in a digressive way is natural and appropriate, We were warned of this in the NYRB introduction!: "Unlike the short stories, AFGT refuses restraint, and Gallant almost gleefully luxuriates in digressive opportunities.
" To the extent that Shirley's story unfolds as disjointedly as if in a dream, well, Shirley's father wasn't completely wrong to discourage his daughter from telling others about her dreams by charging a fee to listen to them.
. .

I would recommend Mavis Gallant's short stories to anyone without hesitation but cannot say the same about this novel, It did not suck me in and make me compulsively read it, That's not to say it's without insights and quite good bits, I can imagine another reader for whom this book would resonate and be more satisfying, and who knows, maybe that would be me in another time, on another reading.
An NYRB Classics Original

Mavis Gallants novels are as memorable as her renowned short stories, Full of wit and psychological poignancy, A Fairly Good Time, here with Green Water, Green Sky, encapsulates Gallants unparalleled skill as a storyteller.


Shirley Perrigny née Norrington, then briefly Higgins, the heroine of A Fairly Good Time, is an original, Derided by the Parisians she lives among and chided by her fellow Canadians, this young widowrecently remarried to a French journalist named Philippeis fond of quoting Jane Austen and Kingsley Amis and of using her myopia as a defense against social aggression.
As the fixed points in Shirleys life begin to recedePhilippe having apparently though not definitively lefther freewheeling, makeshift, and selfabnegating ways come to seem an aspect of devotion to her fellow man.
Could this unreliable protagonist be the unwitting heroine of her own story

Green Water, Green Sky, Gallants first novel, is a darker tale of the fractured family life of Bonnie McCarthy, an American divorcée, and her daughter, Flor.
Uprooted and unmoored, mother and daughter live like itinerantsin Venice, Cannes, and Parisglamorous and dependent, With little hope of escape, Flor attempts to flee this untidy life and the false notes of her mother, Canadian genius, hysterically funny. Since there are two novels in this one book, I've averaged the ratingfor A Fairly Good Time andfor Green Water, Green Sky.
The main title is amusing and full of the wit and sharp phrasing I've come to expect from Gallant, but the story as a whole felt needlessly stretched and indulgent in ways that her short stories never are.
That is directly contradicted in Green Water, Green Sky, which is pitch perfect in its sublime depiction of the dissolution of sanity and its inevitable companions loss, resentment and misunderstanding.
The murky nature of the story didn't grab my interest, It worked more like a trick than a necessary ingredient that elevated the material, This is what you need to know about Shirley Higgins: shesin, ”a great lump of a Campfire girl” how she saw herself in her fatherinlaws eyes, an expat Canadian living in Paris, prone to helping out both friends and random strangers.
Shirleys also widowed and remarried to Philippe, a very proper and successful French journalist, Heres what else you need to know about Shirley: ”, . . when its French Im never sure, I understand every word but do I understand what French means I might know every word in a sentence and still not add up the meaning.
” Thats Shirley in a nutshell: she understands words but not necessarily motives and intentions,

As Mavis Gallants A Fairly Good Time begins, we read Shirleys mothers riotously funny, cruel, and affectionate letter to her daughter, which starts with ”Dearest Girl”, ends with ”Your affectionate Mother”, and includes such gems as ”Of course you had never seen Endymion nonscriptus in Canada! I am assuming this is what your ninepage letter was about.
I could not decipher what seemed to me to be an early Teutonic alphabet, Neither of your marriages ever improved your writing, You may retort that legibility is not the purpose of marriage, I am not sure it has any purpose at all, Your father and I often discussed this, We felt that marriage would have been more tolerable had we been more alikefor example, had both of us been men” and ”I was able to make out the odd phrase here and there.
Of course I dont understand you, Have I ever invited anyone to understand me You cant understand anyone without interfering with that persons privacy, I hope you are not forever after poor Philippe and torturing and prying to get at his inmost thoughts, ” Margaret Norringtons letter to her daughter comprises the first chapter of A Fairly Good Time in its entirety, and it ranks as perhaps the most brilliant and bizarre fictional parental letters and among the best first chapters that Ive ever read.


A Fairly Good Time is populated by some wonderful characters, In addition to Shirley herself, my favorite is her landlady, Madame Roux, ”At the beginning Madame Roux had not trusted Philippe, It had seemed evident to her that any Frenchman who chose to marry a foreign widow of modest income, of no great beauty, settled outside her own country for no apparent reason, must himself be a swindler or a fraud.
When Shirley had said months before, He wants to marry me, Madame Roux had answered, Are you sure he is French Then she said, Does he think you own your apartment That seemed important.
Did he know it was a mere rental, . . ” And here Shirley reflects on Madame Roux: ”Madame Roux was rat, serpent, lizard, spider, bitch, vixen, roach and louse all the same, Shirley missed her.
”

A Fairly Good Time is a slow meander through Shirleys life, We learn how Shirley loses a husband, gains another husband, and then loses him too how she gains a lover and loses a lover and almost gains another how she loses her apartment and how she gains and tries to care for friends.
Shirleys disorganized in her thinking, in her apartment, and in her life, Gallant brilliantly explains and explores Shirleys disorganization, sometimes in her first person voice, sometimes in a letter to her former husband, sometimes through a third person narrator.
Shirleys disorganization makes A Fairly Good time difficult reading sometimes: Gallant perfectly pairs its meandering plot and its meandering apparent digressions with Shirleys own disorganization.
In a letter to her husband, Shirley explains ”One other thing: I am not incompetent, I seem so, but Im not, A first impression is always wrong: so is the second, third and twentieth, I really wish you would come back, ” Gallant is always a subtle writer, and its easy to miss essential plot twists: Shirleys hookup with her neighbor is revealed only by ”Lovemaking was exorcism in its simplest form.
”
for Fairly Good Time and,for Green Water, Green Sky, which read like thes offspring of Edith Wharton and Jean Rhys, The shift in tone between the two was notable, with the longer Fairly Good Time more sardonic and disjointed, and the shorter tale more compressed and quietly heartbreaking.
Another Canadian woman writer who deserves more attention thanks NYRB! Tedious This is the bestwritten book I've read this year, Not my favorite book, but the book where every sentence was so alarmingly perfect that I needed to stop and give a little gasp and read it again, and maybe once more after that.
Sometimes writers who write this exquisitely at the sentencelevel are called 'writers' writers' but that's not what I'm talking about, This isn't beautiful sentencelevel prose for its own sake, It's not over polished gemlike writing, It's perfect writing. The sentences are not only beautiful in their shape and vocabulary choice but they convey great meaning in each condensed space from the first Capital Letter to the Period at the end.
They tell the story. They reveal the character. They move the story forward, And they delight. All at once. I would say it is timeless writing, too, in that it's so uniquely hers and nobody else writes like this, It's short. I hope you find time for it soon, A Fairly Good Time reminded me of The Dud Avocado in many ways: an exuberant, freespirited, impulsive young woman from North America moves to Paris with aspirations of coming into her own.
But unlike in the Dud Avocado, here the protagonist Shirley endeavors to acclimate herself to the Parisian people and culture, whether the city wants her or not.
Isolation, love, regret, and confusion, ensue,

So refined is Gallant's style that at times its difficult to decipher what's happening Gallant often makes clear the importance of what goes unsaid or what's between the lines, but leaves it to the reader to figure out what those important things are.
I like how Michael Ondaatje describes Gallant's writing on the back blurb: "In a sentence she could tilt a situation a few subliminal degrees.
. . so that we begin to see her characters from a more compassionate or more satirical position, " With Gallant it seems to be all in the details, details with which she plays with her readers, I can imagine some readers not enjoying how open ended every sentence and scene seems to be, but personally I enjoyed being played with by Mme Gallant.
I decided to launch to Gallant's works by reading her novels first, and I don't regret it, Both stories are so different but they leave you a strange sort of sorrow,
What struck me the most, as is also noted in the introduction, are the flashbacks which imprint "the weight of a memory on a page.
" While it reminds of Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood, there's an odd detachment from the heavy memory, as if the feelings associated with the memory have been exhausted.
There are countless brilliant recollections in both the novels,
Despite their darkness, there is wry humor that still manages to make you smile, As for the stories, it is difficult to summarize the plot the plot is much like our daily lives, the extraordinary lives in the ordinary.
All I can say yes, you can't read this book for the "plot", you read it for the evocative experience, I haven't read Green Water, Green Sky yet this is for A Fairly Good Time, Reading Mavis Gallant is like dining on the very finest meal, Great flavors and surprising turns to tickle the palate, Shirley is at turns silly, maddening, puzzling, and finally endearing as her whole story maybe unfolds, I will read every word this brilliant mind ever set down, We get to know Shirley Perrigny, formerly Higgins, nee Norrington, through a nonlinear jumble of perspectives her husband, her several inlaws, her assortment of friends and acquaintances, her landlord, her mother, Shirley herself, and ard person narrator who weaves in and out among the characters and is sometimes in Shirleys head, and sometimes not.
All of this is the perfect way to get to know the utterly original Shirley, whose life didn't start out promising in her first few months of existence her mother thought she was a tumor, and when she was born, she was named by the doctor because her parents couldn't think of a name.


Her soontobe exhusband tells her “your life is like a house without doors” a lovely way to say she has no boundaries.
She knows this, but cant seem to stop:

“All her private dialogues were furnished with scraps of prose recited out of context, like the disparate chairs carpets and lamps adrift in her apartment.
She carried her notions of conversation into active life and felt as if she had been invited to act in a play without having been told the name of it.
No one had ever mentioned who the author was or if the action was supposed to be sad or hilarious, She came on stage wondering whether the plot was gently falling apart or rushing onward toward a solution, Cues went unheeded and unrecognized, and she annoyed the other players by bringing in lines from any other piece she happened to recall.
”

In addition to having a great main character, this book is frequently HILARIOUS, starting with the opening pages, where Shirleys mother writes her a Poloniuslike letter of advice, including such gems as “Dont cry whilst writing letters.
The person receiving it is apt to take it as a reproach, Undefined misery is no use to anyone, Be clear, or better still, be silent, ”

Another favorite of mine, Shirleys experience of being a Canadian in Paris:

“she had been daunted by the wave of hostility that rose to greet the stranger in Paris.
Nothing seemed to be considered rude or preposterous if it was said to someone like her, We wanted to give you beans and jam for dinner to make you feel at home, but my wife refuses to do American cooking.
”

And this description of Shirleys hypochondriac motherinlaw:

“Yet the fact of eating alarmed her, Peristalsis was an enemy she had never mastered, Her intestines were of almost historical importance: soothed with bismuth, restored with charcoal, they were still as nothing to her stomach in which fourcourse meals remained for days, undigested, turning over and over like clothes forgotten in a tumble dryer.
”

Update: I got so carried away with the wit, I may have made it sound like a flatout comedy, but it isn't, there is much that is poignant, it just isn't milked for cheap emotion.
For example, my first quote from her mother's letter, while funny, also shows the kinds of letters Shirley has been sending her mother, and the way her mother responds to her misery.
Here's another quote from the novel: "Mrs, Norrington was an attentive listener only Shirley had ever failed to catch her ear, ”.