SOURCE: Illis, Mark. “Partners That Do Not Change Enough.” Spectator 264, no. 8430 (10 February 1990): 29.

In the following review, Illis comments on the plots and characterizations of In Transit.

Mavis Gallant's characters, fathers and sons, lovers, husbands and wives, are hopelessly incompatible. They are prone to realise this either with an awareness that quietly creeps up on them, or the opposite way, with a moment of sudden, terrifying clarity:

He accepted this stunning shock: he was 40, he had never been able to earn a living, and in a moment of sexual insanity he had taken on a young, young wife.

Old husbands with young, young wives are a recurring theme in [In Transit], but there are variations on it: there are women who marry disgruntled poets, women who marry Frenchmen when they barely know the language, and men who have mistresses who are much older. Gallant examines these relationships with an...