After the First Dog Dies

I suspect that many readers have a single literary moment they repeatedly return to. A line, stanza, paragraph, or page that offers on demand that acute delight one can work through a shelf of well-crafted books without stumbling across. Lately, I come back to a single sentence by Mavis Gallant, the expatriate Canadian short story writer. Gallant, who was born in Montreal and lives in Paris but writes in English, is one of the finest living writers our language has.

“The Moslem Wife”—the story to which I return for my reliable shot of the sublime—begins in 1919, in the aftermath of a war so gruesome that “there would never be a man-made catastrophe in Europe again.” Netta Asher’s father signs a hundred-year renewal of the family lease on the Hotel Prince Albert and Albion on the French Riviera. Eleven-year-old Netta watches, understanding that this lease has determined much of her life. The scene is followed by a lengthy stretch of summary. Netta marries her first cousin, Jack Ross. She takes over the hotel. Her parents die. Jack’s ailing mother comes to live with them. Most of this is lightly told, but a few themes are examined closely: Jack’s easygoing philandering, and Netta’s insistence that “the past holds no attractions.” “There are no ghosts,” she thinks, when she enters the room where her parents died. “If there were, I would know.”

Time passes so unobtrusively—twenty years in twenty pages—that it seems almost curious when talk of an impending war begins. Didn’t we agree not so long ago to be done with that business? As the talk grows inevitably more serious, Jack leaves for England, planning to be gone a few weeks.