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. Continue reading →