ACROSS THE BRIDGE

Eleven more spare, elegant stories from French-Canadian author Gallant (In Transit, 1989, etc.), ten of which first appeared in The New Yorker. Interconnected vignettes of the family Carette form the first four stories. In ``1933,'' a newly widowed but stalwart Mme. Carette is forced to move with her young daughters Berthe and Marie to a smaller apartment in a seedy street in Montreal. Sixteen years later, in ``The Chosen Husband,'' a still resolute Mme. Carette arranges a marriage for her feeble-witted younger child Marie. By the 60's, in ``From Cloud to Cloud,'' Marie's husband has died and Marie must move in with older sister Berthe; meanwhile, Marie's 18- year-old son Raymond steals the family Volkswagen and flees to the US and Vietnam. ``Florida'' recounts his subsequent spotty career in the motel trade. Other stories are divided between Montreal and Paris, where Gallant has lived since the 1950's. In ``Dede,'' an upper-class Parisian schoolboy is braced by a visit from his black- sheep uncle. In the lengthy title story, a feisty French-Italian girl almost succeeds in overturning her mother's plan that she marry Arnaud Pons, son of Parisian family friends—until she discovers that marrying Arnaud is exactly what will make her happy. In ``Forain'' and the lovely ``A State of Affairs,'' Gallant touchingly follows the now circumscribed lives of a handful of elderly Central European refugees in Paris. And in the final, brilliant ``The Fenton Child,'' she returns to Montreal, where a proper Irish Catholic girl—with a charming ward-heeler for a father—aids in what she comes to realize is an illegal adoption arranged for an ``English'' family in the district. In each of these pieces and others, the details are all: shades of meaning turn on the condition of the furnishings and the color of the light. Another fine collection from Gallant.