SOURCE: Betts, Doris. Review of Across the Bridge, by Mavis Gallant. America 1170, no. 8 (5 March 1994): 28.

In the following review, Betts examines the unsentimental tone and perspective of Across the Bridge.

Aristotle describes the “great-souled man” as one who, moving others, is himself unmoved. In these 11 stories that make up her 11th book, [Across the Bridge,] Canadian native Mavis Gallant writes with the skill of a great-souled woman whose calm narrative style seems to keep her, like her character Blaise Forain, “at a remove” from painful events so understated that the reader's heart may already have broken before he felt it crack.

Gallant is not, of course, “unmoved” so much as unsentimental. Her protagonists are mostly decent people in Paris and Montreal doing the best they can and not doing very well. Like Tremski, an unread and unappreciated author, their windows look out on “the sort of view that prisoners...