A FAIRLY GOOD TIME

by Mavis Gallant ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1970

Miss Gallant, known mainly for her fine frosty etching of opaque recognitions in The New Yorker, here assays a novel-length portrait of her own Isabel Archer beset by snaky Europeans. Product of a Canadian bluestocking mother (""Of course I don't you. Have I ever invited anyone to 'understand' me?"") and a father whose last words were: ""Don't touch your god damned capital,"" Shirley lives out her timeless days after her French husband Philippe has left her in Paris. Her husband Pete had been killed by a blundering error in Italy where ""no one was kind,"" and Shirley herself moves among her European encounters like a giant Alice sweeping through a jungle of outraged creatures. Her efforts to help are unwanted and unrewarded; her words ""toads"" as soon as they leave her mouth. She sits up with an ungrateful would-be suicide; lectures a bed partner on the ""centuries of female rubbish"" involved in the masculine dream of female rapture; becomes involved with a grim French family whose young daughter, Claude, is not equipped for the freedom she desires. Finally outwitted by all those who live their lives frugally and carefully like button-matchers, Shirley, after the divorce and dispossession from the home she thought Philippe would give her, writes a jaunty, thumb-to-nose note to him--a satisfactory if ""irretrievable error."" The epigram supplies the title by way of Edith Wharton: ""If you make up your mind not to be happy, no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time."" The certain Gallant audience will do better than that.

Pub Date: March 1, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1970

Categories: FICTION