SOURCE: Elgaard, Elín. Review of Across the Bridge, by Mavis Gallant. World Literature Today 68, no. 3 (summer 1994): 579.

In the following review, Elgaard argues that Across the Bridge is thematically redundant and derivative.

In the eleven stories of Across the Bridge, Mavis Gallant's eleventh work, there are few surprises, though, once past the first four (of which “flowers from an earlier wedding banked on the altar rail” may serve emblematically for tired and tested territory), things brighten somewhat. But whether Montréal or Paris, Across the Bridge is a pitiless survey of humanity—Katherine Mansfield at her burlesque worst (“Germans at Meat”) comes to mind.

The aged anthropologist of “Kingdom Come” is—if typically caricatured—allowed some inner life in his terror of being cast off, by his audience as by his adult children, in a New Europe, to which “he had brought back one more system, and no...