Most of Miss Gallant's characters [in the stories in "The Other Paris" are] … unhappy because of the disparity between reality and their dreams. The heroine of the title-story finds that Paris falls far short of her expectations; she forces herself to forget the "rain and her unshared confusion and loneliness" and creates a myth of her own which is "accurate … but untrue."…

Miss Gallant, like Henry James, is fascinated by the idea of the American in Europe; the best of her stories delineate the contrast between American and European values, mores, states of mind. She does not present a flattering or a pleasant picture; her Americans are futile, predatory, or unhappy; they fail to understand, or they are misunderstood. Fortunately, Miss Gallant avoids the stereotyped caricatures of the provincial American in the Old World; even her least admirable characters have their moments of tenderness and half-realized understanding. The...