SOURCE: Gross, Jeff. Review of Overhead in a Balloon, by Mavis Gallant. Los Angeles Times Book Review (24 May 1987): 8.

In the following review, Gross summarizes the themes and style of Overhead in a Balloon.

Behind the tourist's Paris is a city that struggles to regain momentum and a sense of purpose that drifts between the lure of the technological, “European” future, and a longing for the golden past.

A malaise most perceptively described by Mavis Gallant, a Canadian exile who has lived in Paris since 1950. In the stories [in Overhead in a Balloon], 11 of which appeared in The New Yorker, her characters—French painters, writers, Royalists and art gallery owners—are sometimes nostalgic, sometimes frightened, more often resigned to small battles, with son, spouse or tax collector. And, sign of the times, culture is a game of adapting to the winds of political or philosophical fashion, rather than joust...