A Fairly Good Time: with Green Water, Green Sky by Mavis Gallant

A Fairly Good Time: with Green Water, Green Sky Reviews

• 
  Lark Benobi

  This is the best-written 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 sentence-level are called 'writers' writers' but that's not what I'm talking about. This isn't beautiful sentence-level prose for its own sake. It's not over polished gem-like 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.
• 
  J.

  She would not have lived in a place partly furnished by strangers. The curtains would have been taken down, the carpets rolled and tied with string and put in the basement for moths to feed on. Here you built a life around other people's leavings--your family's, or people you had never seen but whose traces you might find in provincial museums. You built around a past of glass cases, shabby lighting, a foul-smelling guardian saying, "It is forbidden."
  
  What begins as a whirling, Joycean immersion into the bohemian world of a Canadian expat woman living in Paris-- never really finds its pattern or frame. Author Gallant gives us five or six opening chapters that threaten to orchestrate an all-in-a-day sort of novel, a tour of the hours of one counter-mythic Shirley Norrington. Although brimming with expository detail, never stopping to linger, no time to take an extra breath... We are after all in the nouvelle-vague-ish uproar and flashpoint setting of 1963, where everything is clashingly contrary and about to go bang with the sixties... but.
  
  Against that chaotic background we're stuck with thoughtful, quiet, just-regular Shirley, never very assertive, always willing to take in a stray dog, and the novel goes, well, kind of diagonal. No longer with the heroine of an odysseus-for-a-day structure, the reader is led on a winding series of distractions and confounding contradictions; the central part of the book is more a lonely-hearts tour, on a budget, of the astringent delights of postwar Paris.
  
  He and I can't see each other again because of collusion. I meant to ask him why he had married me, so that I could tell other people. But perhaps no one will ask me that any more now. I wanted to tell him that I was not sure why he had left me. I haven't behaved in any way that was not predictable from our first conversation. Well, I said nothing. I'm about as I always was, so please don't worry.
  
  Our heroine's world isn't grounded, she's not getting to the cafes where Baldwin and Richard Wright weathered the Parisian flux. This bohemian business seemed a lot more exotic at the outset. There is an undertow of near-hysteria, the vertigo of being in complete charge of a project that is noticeably out of control.
  
  Shirley falls in love, thinks about it, falls out, walks out, walks back in, falls apart. And then picks up and goes again. As in any complicated life, people will be unpredictable, events will upset or right the applecart just when you don't expect them to. What begins as epic has long ago disintegrated, and can most kindly be described as sporadic, episodic. Ports of call in a storm that Cervantes would recognize. Lovely.
  
  __________________
  "Green Water, Green Sky", included in this volume, is here:
  https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
• 
  Dan

  This is what you need to know about Shirley Higgins: she’s 27 in 1963, ”a great lump of a Campfire girl” how she saw herself in her father-in-law’s eyes, an ex-pat Canadian living in Paris, prone to helping out both friends and random strangers. Shirley’s also widowed and remarried to Philippe, a very proper and successful French journalist. Here’s what else you need to know about Shirley: ”’. . . when it’s French I’m 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.’” That’s Shirley in a nutshell: she understands words but not necessarily motives and intentions.
  
  As Mavis Gallant’s A Fairly Good Time begins, we read Shirley’s mother’s 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 non-scriptus in Canada! I am assuming this is what your nine-page 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 alike—for example, had both of us been men” and ”I was able to make out the odd phrase here and there. Of course I don’t ‘understand’ you. Have I ever invited anyone to ‘understand’ me? You can’t ‘understand’ anyone without interfering with that person’s privacy. I hope you are not forever after poor Philippe and torturing and prying to get at his inmost thoughts.” Margaret Norrington’s 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 I’ve 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 Shirley’s 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. Shirley’s disorganized in her thinking, in her apartment, and in her life. Gallant brilliantly explains and explores Shirley’s disorganization, sometimes in her first person voice, sometimes in a letter to her former husband, sometimes through a third person narrator. Shirley’s disorganization makes A Fairly Good time difficult reading sometimes: Gallant perfectly pairs its meandering plot and its meandering apparent digressions with Shirley’s own disorganization. In a letter to her husband, Shirley explains ”One other thing: I am not incompetent. I seem so, but I’m 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 it’s easy to miss essential plot twists: Shirley’s hook-up with her neighbor is revealed only by ”Lovemaking was exorcism in its simplest form.”
  
• 
  Nadine in California

  We get to know Shirley Perrigny, formerly Higgins, nee Norrington, through a nonlinear jumble of perspectives – her husband, her several in-laws, her assortment of friends and acquaintances, her landlord, her mother, Shirley herself, and a 3rd person narrator who weaves in and out among the characters and is sometimes in Shirley’s 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 soon-to-be ex-husband tells her “your life is like a house without doors” - a lovely way to say she has no boundaries. She knows this, but can’t 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 Shirley’s mother writes her a Polonius-like letter of advice, including such gems as “Don’t 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, Shirley’s 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 Shirley’s hypochondriac mother-in-law:
  
  “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 four-course 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 flat-out 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.”
• 
  Michael

  Since there are two novels in this one book, I've averaged the rating--3 stars for A Fairly Good Time and 5 stars for 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.
• 
  Anca

  All hail Mavis the master. Still need to read Green Water, Green Sky, which I will savor next year.
• 
  Liam

  A Fairly Good Time reminded me of The Dud Avocado in many ways: an exuberant, free-spirited, 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.
• 
  Lynn Silsby

  Three stars 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 fast-moving. Both feature twenty-something, somewhat ditzy expats living in post-war 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 Lucy-style comedic mishaps, the story takes on a lonely and despairing pitch. I do not think this novel was ever intended as a light-hearted 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.
• 
  Aditi

  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.
• 
  Neil

  I got through the first 💯 pages, then decided to give it a miss. It's not a story with much of a plot, but sometimes amusing reflections on life, family, and its ramifications... somewhat dated in style, and too much work to plough through. Perhaps I'll try her short stories next time round.
• 
  Hazel

  Tedious
• 
  S. Kirk Walsh

  I read this along with Elliott Holt and A Public Space (a literary magazine in NYC) online book group. We focused on the shorter novel of the two, GREEN WATER, GREEN SKY. Gallant was primarily a short story writer, and these two novels represent her only novels. Due to her dedication to the short-story form, GWGS defies genre—separated into four distinct sections (three were published originally in the New Yorker)—it could read as a quartet of stories, but instead it functions as "a strange, glittery thing that works on its own terms." (E. Holt) I highly recommend GWGS if you're interested in reading a novel with a compelling narrative structure and transcendent prose that teeters on tragic and comic. As was mentioned during the discussion with APS, the structure revolves around emotional chronology rather than event chronology, and this creates an unique experience for the reader. I highly recommend the APS online reading series. Here's more details if you're interested in reading along with one of their upcoming books:
  https://apublicspace.org/events Next up is TRUE GRIT by Charles Portis (with the conversation led by Ed Park).
• 
  astried

  i've read and loved many of mavis gallant's short stories. in my reviews i described them as substantial precious nuggets, to be savoured and cherished.
  
  now i wonder if just like saramago needed the space of a novel, gallant also needed the constraints of short stories.
  
  it's not that gallant's novels are bad. i see her there as i see her in short story. only, it might be too much of a good thing in a longer space. and as much as i could see the movement of shirley, the change of dynamics, those things needing novel's length, still it took me so much effort to swallow. too much dark chocolate.
  
  green water was easier since it was broken into clear parts. then again, that'd make it more similar to her other short stories where she covered same characters over several stories.
  
  it was a good read but something i'd need to reread to completely digest.
  
  3.5 stars
• 
  Amy Gentry

  What compels a consummate writer of short stories to stretch her legs in a novel? For the Canadian-born Mavis Gallant, who penned 116 stories for the New Yorker before her death in 2014, the question seems particularly germane. Abandoned by her mother as a child in a French-Canadian school, she awaited her father’s return for years after he was already dead. As an adult, Gallant chose permanent outsiderdom, relocating to Paris early in her writing career and living alone after a brief marriage. Her work, preoccupied with dislocation and rootlessness, shows no patience for the arcs of cause and effect, action and reaction, that knit illustrative scenes into novels. A 1996 New York Times review quotes her as saying that some of her linked stories could have been a novel, but “then I thought, four incidents tell the whole story, and so why bore readers with pages of connective tissue?”
  
  Gallant never bores; her stories are packed tight with dense, prickly detail. The best of them—the much-anthologized “Speck’s Idea,” for instance, or “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street”—read like novels with all the soft parts burned out. It is part of Gallant’s restless and unsparing rigor to demand that a reader stay interested in every detail only as long as Gallant herself stays interested in them, and not a millisecond longer; enjoy a fine sentence too long, and you’re likely to miss an important plot point, even a death, in the next one. Connective tissue has its uses.
  
  Gallant’s only two completed novels, Green Water, Green Sky (1959) and A Fairly Good Time (1970), newly reprinted in one volume by NYRB Classics, strain at the limits of her strictly-bounded style like clothes popping out of a suitcase. While neither fully achieves a novelistic sense of unfolding, their striving after form nevertheless feels important, perhaps even crucial to understanding Gallant’s evolution as a prose stylist. It’s worth reading the two in chronological order (not how they are published in the NYRB edition) in order to watch Gallant’s prose break itself open, if only for moments at a time.
  
  Written in distinct sections from multiple points of view, Green Water, Green Sky reads like a series of short stories—in fact, one of its chapters was previously published as the story “Travelers Must Be Content.” American divorcee Bonnie McCarthy drags her daughter Florence around Europe with her; crippled by a childhood utterly dependent on the whims of her narcissistic mother, “Flor” begins to break down mentally after her marriage. It’s a plot straight out of a Henry James novel, populated with Jamesian characters—lifelong hotel-dwellers, professional hangers-on, even Flor’s fresh-faced American husband, nicknamed “The Seal” because he is compulsively charming (“The concierge was minutes recovering from his greeting every day” (320)). Each character has a faceted appeal, like one of James’s “centers of consciousness” sharpened to fine edges.
  
  Only Flor herself doesn’t fit. Flor suffers from dissociative episodes that strike her at random and culminate in a psychotic break; her chapter is, tellingly, split between her point of view and her mother’s. During one bout of madness, she hallucinates Shakespeare: “They were words out of the old days, when she could still read, and relate every sentence to the sentence it followed.” (294) As if to corroborate this loss of language and meaning, Flor’s point of view vanishes from the novella abruptly.
  
  A Fairly Good Time, published a decade later, also features a woman in the throes of a breakdown. It’s not Canadian Shirley Perrigny’s mind that’s breaking down, but her marriage to her French husband, Philippe. Yet A Fairly Good Time is both darker and funnier than the earlier novel, perhaps because it abandons the attempt at an orderly structure and adopts fragmentation itself as a guiding principle. The result is a funhouse world in which Shirley’s vaguely dissociative state seems like a reasonable response to the craziness around her. Shirley passes the time waiting for Philippe to come back to their Parisian apartment by sleeping with the upstairs neighbor, reading a hilarious thousand-page manuscript by Philippe’s supposedly platonic friend Genevieve, and helping out a series of suicidal and manipulative girlfriends. The details of Shirley’s failed marriage dribble out between bizarre encounters, most notably with a family of French grotesques with whom she has become unwittingly entangled.
  
  In form, A Fairly Good Time is a polyphonic hodgepodge, sprinkled with letters, inscriptions, quotes, and nursery rhymes (these last humorously mangled in translation). A late section in the book takes the shape of a long letter in which Shirley narrates the story of her first husband’s random death. It is unexpectedly moving, perhaps the most vulnerable passage by Gallant I’ve ever read, emerging from the chaose in a rare shimmer of earnestness: “When we came to the end of the village street I knew that the only success of my life, my sole achievement, would be this marriage.” (204)
  
  Such unions, Gallant seems to say, are made to be smashed. More characteristic is the perfectly funny and perfectly cruel sign-off to the letter from Shirley’s mother that opens the novel: “To think that when you were on the way I believed you were a tumour! But you were you—oh, very much so.” (9) When one is born with such a sense of outsiderdom, the ties that bind must seem fragile indeed.
  
  Originally published in the Chicago Tribune:
  https://www.chicagotribune.com/entert...
• 
  Brian

  This review is for AFGT only, as I started the novella but never really made a genuine attempt at it.
  
  I loved this novel. It felt so alive to me, awkward and earnest and depressing and vibrant. It was neither overly romantic nor overly realistic. Despite all the flavor and character, it read rather matter-of-factly. The writing built and built even as the narrative almost fell apart. I enjoyed it very much.
• 
  Genevieve Brassard

  4 for Fairly Good Time and 4.5 for Green Water, Green Sky, which read like the 1950s 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!) 😊
• 
  Bonnie

  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.
• 
  Tricia Florence

  Very well written. I love the way she writes. Found the story line a bit depressing. Don't need depressing these days.
• 
  Aaron

  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.
• 
  F Cats

  Splendid.
• 
  Salvatore

  Canadian genius, hysterically funny.