SOURCE: Schinto, Jeanne. “Maps Can Only Show So Much.” Belles Lettres 9, no. 4 (summer 1994): 14.

In the following excerpt, Schinto summarizes the major themes of Across the Bridge.

The stories in Mavis Gallant's 11th book, Across the Bridge, take place in three separate countries—Canada, France, and the United States; they also span several decades, taking into account such events as World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam (or “the War in Indochina,” as it is called in Paris). Gallant never tries to portray such global cataclysms directly, however; instead, her gift is to show how local lives are inevitably transformed in their wake or else keep on going, gloriously oblivious. In this way she can illuminate the inner lives of her characters, as fiction is supposed to do, at the same time as she creates the illusion that she has captured on paper the very rock and swivel...