SOURCE: Brookner, Anita. “A Canadian in Paris.” Spectator 259, no. 8302 (29 August 1987): 26-7.

In the following review, Brookner addresses the themes and narrative style of Overhead in a Balloon, comparing the collection to Gallant's novel A Fairly Good Time.

Mavis Gallant, the Canadian writer, has long been appropriated by the New Yorker, for whom she produces lapidary short stories, which, by an inevitable process of osmosis, have become more characteristic of the New Yorker than of Mavis Gallant. This is to be regretted, for the author, perhaps too little known in this country, since her earlier works are out of print, is able to turn out breathtaking fragments of narrative of a very special kind. She is an expert on rootlessness, or displacement: her characters roam around Europe in the grey aftermath of the second world war, missing trains, winding up in the spare rooms of other people's apartments, taking...