A Fairly Good Time and Green Water, Green Sky

AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINAL Mavis Gallant's novels are as memorable as her renowned short stories. Full of wit and psychological poignancy, A Fairly Good Time , here with Green Water, Green Sky , encapsulates Gallant's unparalleled skill as a storyteller. Shirley Perrigny (n e Norrington, then briefly Higgins), the heroine of A Fairly Good Time , is an original. Derided by the Parisians she lives among and chided by her fellow Canadians, this young widow--recently remarried to a French journalist named Philippe--is fond of quoting Jane Austen and Kingsley Amis and of using her myopia as a defense against social aggression. As the fixed points in Shirley's life begin to recede--Philippe having apparently though not definitively left--her freewheeling, makeshift, and self-abnegating ways come to seem an aspect of devotion to her fellow man. Could this unreliable protagonist be the unwitting heroine of her own story? Green Water, Green Sky , Gallant's first novel, is a darker tale of the fractured family life of Bonnie McCarthy, an American divorc e, and her daughter, Flor. Uprooted and unmoored, mother and daughter live like itinerants--in Venice, Cannes, and Paris--glamorous and dependent. With little hope of escape, Flor attempts to flee this untidy life and the false notes of her mother.