BOOKS WE CAN’T QUIT: Green Water, Green Sky by Mavis Gallant

 

It gives me great pleasure to reintroduce PANK’s Books We Can’t Quit series – reviews of books that are at least ten years old and have shadowed and shaded, infected and influenced, struck and stuck with us ever since we first read them.  And it is with a certain bittersweetness that the first book I’m offering is by the late, great Mavis Gallant.  An expatriate like so many of her characters, Gallant left her native Canada for Europe in 1951. There she wrote stories about rootless and possibility – more than 100 of them appearing in The New Yorker – and two novels, one of them Green Water, Green Sky.  She died in Paris, on 18 February, at the age of 91.  –Randon Noble, Reviews Editor at PANK

 

Green Water, Green Sky by Mavis Gallant, 1959

 

Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

Whartonesque in its focus on the travails of the unfortunate wealthy, Mavis Gallant’s Green Water, Green Sky uses lush language and sharp insights to tell the story of a young woman’s mental deterioration.

Bonnie McCarthy is an expatriate in self-imposed exile.  She and her daughter Flor bounce from one European resort community to another, surviving mostly on the good will of Bonnie’s brothers and some form of child support. Flor, by turns emotionally friable and drily vicious, eventually succumbs to a psychic woundedness that seems to arise at least in part from the instability and vacuous rootlessness of their nomad’s life.

Bonnie blames their exile on her husband, who humiliated her so completely upon discovering Bonnie’s self-described “surpassingly silly affair” with a doctor back in the States that she refuses ever to go home again. For Flor, their lifestyle results in a seemingly unfulfillable longing that infuses nearly every aspect of her life. “Lacking an emotional country, it might be possible to consider another person one’s home. It was the most dangerous of ideas, this ‘only you can save me,’” run her thoughts as she falls in love with her future husband. A similarly needy closeness connects her to her mother, which both weary of as they realize “their closeness had been a trap, and each could now think, If it hadn’t been for you, my life would have been different.” This emotional fragility defines Flor’s character and predicts her ultimate mental breakdown.

Early in the book, Flor’s cousin George, at seventeen, reminisces about his visit with Flor and Bonnie ten years earlier at the Grand Canal of Venice. At that time, Flor’s disgust with him becomes vivid as “he and Flor hung over rickety wooden railings,” high above the water, and “…he met her eyes, green as water, bright with dislike, and she said, ‘It would be easy to push someone in right here. I could push you in.’” It is through George that we get a sense of Flor’s self-focus and iciness.

But we pity her, too. Flor’s memories from that time differ from George’s, her selectively naïve nostalgia revealing her vulnerability, and also suggesting the book’s title: “‘Do you remember how green it was all the time? … Everything was so clear and green, green water, even the sky looked green to me.’” The image of this green sky jars the reader, warning us of Flor’s unstable and deteriorating vantage on the world, and green becomes a color of dissonance throughout the rest of the book.

The four sections of the book shift point of view, while also retaining a trace of omniscience, giving us different perspectives on the two main women: Flor (Florence) and her mother Bonnie. The first and final sections belong mainly to Flor’s seven-years-younger cousin, George Fairlie, who offers a long view of the women over time and through the less-biased lens of not-so-close family. The second, more myopic section comes from Bonnie herself, and the third belongs to her visiting “friend” Wishart, who has fabricated an identity that lets him mooch his way through his summers on the hospitality of socially successful older women. His vantage on Bonnie and Flor is even more distant, and even less forgiving than George’s. Each section shows glimpses of varying depth into the character of the women at the center of the novel.

Flor’s husband’s stolid pragmatism contrasts Bonnie’s precious fussiness and Flor’s emotional unpredictability. Bonnie’s perspective sums up Bob’s equanimity in succinct phrases, such as, “Bob Harris loved Paris, but then he loved anywhere … He carried his birthright with him.” But his eminent stability cannot still Flor’s inner machinery. Whether or not he is present, unnerving episodes such as this one plague her: “Florence was walking with cautious steps along the Boulevard des Capucines when the sidewalk came up before her…. It was a soundless upheaval, and it had happened before…It was possible that she had become invisible.”

Further exploration of Flor’s mental collapse reveals her hunger for a sense of home but also the superficiality of the world she grew up in. Bonnie rues “Bonnie’s New York, the real New York, … a distant, gleaming city in a lost decade. A lost Bonnie existed there, pretty and pert, outrageously admired.” She transfers her appetite for admiration onto her daughter whose inattention to her own beauty elicits Bonnie’s constant criticism. Flor “dressed oddly, and looked a wraith,” and Bonnie grieves that “she was only twenty-six and had lost her looks.” Underlining the pressure of the superficial in Flor’s world, her aunt Fairlie says of her, “You’re too pretty to waste.”

The alternate pressures and lacks in Flor’s internal infrastructure foretell her unraveling, and its effects on the people closest to her form the heart of the book. But Gallant’s language alone is enough to enthrall. Bob Harris works “in a cake-shaped building of the thirties.” Flor’s neighbor and quasi-friend’s character comes clear in a few quick strokes: “She did not belong in their lives or in the Paris summer. She belonged to an unknown cindery city full of used-car lots.” Then, “He was alone and ridiculous with pigeons” captures young George’s self-doubts. These gems sparkle throughout the writing.

This mastery of language is what first pulled me into the book. Gallant’s sumptuous, flowing descriptions shimmer, then surprise with their canny succinctness. But her interest in her characters’ suffering drew me in, too. Much of the cleverness of our contemporary literature seems to require flippancy and jadedness from its characters, as if vulnerability were an embarrassingly out-of-fashion human condition. Gallant made that very portion of the human condition her bailiwick, and her deftly chosen language makes her characters’ vulnerability ripple nervously, and beautifully, from the page.

***

Jody Hobbs Hesler lives and writes in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and her work appears or is forthcoming in Steel Toe Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Prime Number, Pearl, Stealing Time: A Literary Magazine for Parents, Charlottesville Family Magazine, A Short Ride: Remembering Barry Hannah, and more. You can follow her on her Facebook writer page: Jody Hobbs Hesler – Writer or at jodyhobbshesler.com.