In each country the reviews are characterized by a ready acknowledgement of Munro’s accomplishment and genius, but this sense as usual was most pointed in Canada. William French revisited Hugh Garner’s foreword to Dance in order to say that what Garner saw then is emphatically still true in Munro’s stories: she continues to endow “the lives of ordinary people in ordinary places with extra-ordinary interest.” In an extended and thorough reading, Philip Marchand in the Toronto Star asked parenthetically while discussing Munro’s description of kitchen walls, “Is there another contemporary writer who has dwelt, in her fiction, so lovingly on trim?” He might have also said wallpaper, or types of cloth, or the appearance of dishes on a counter, or a multitude of other things. He then continued to assert quite correctly that in Munro’s fiction “people remain the same fools they always were.”
Like Marchand, reviewers of Friend of My Youth were keen to refer to some of Munro’s earlier work as a way into the present book. Mary Jo Salter’s offering in the New Republic began with a detailed reading of “Accident” from Moons, which concludes with Frances’s realization that “people don’t matter, [they] are not terribly distinctive or important; and we all end up,” like the two characters who die in the story, “in a casket.” Salter wrote that “what moves and unnerves me each time I look at ‘Accident’ is the simultaneous impression Munro gives that we are both irreplaceable and dispensable.” Moving from “Accident” to “Miles City, Montana,” Salter referred to the narrator’s dismissal of her former husband Andrew as a “single-sentence, lacerating paragraph.” Moving finally into the new book, she noted that Munro is a writer who “respects our intelligence, our right to sift on our own the cruel world she shows us.… Cruel and bizarre things do happen in this book,” and there’s “a tonal harshness, too, which we welcome.”
The balanced thoroughness of Salter’s review of Friend of My Youth is most evident when she takes up the question of authorial range:
Nearly every major character in this book, as in Munro’s others, is a woman; most are adulterers; most are seen over a span of some years; most are perceptive and articulate about their own longings and failings; and every story but ‘Friend of My Youth’ is recounted in the third person. Such a clustering of similarities is often the sign of a limited writer, and probably an autobiographical writer (not necessarily, of course, the same thing).
Yet although Munro strikes me as exactly the sort of person I would care to know, I don’t at all have the feeling that I do. Like the machinery of her sentences, she is in some important way admirably invisible. Munro writes of certain attributes – selfishness or carelessness, for example – with the authority of one who has ‘been there’; but she is remarkably selfless in her presentation of material that may, in this way or that, be autobiographical. And given other similarities among her stories – their rueful but not lugubrious tone, the acute sense her characters suffer of the ineffability of life’s lessons – the mutations Munro achieves in characterization and plotting are even more impressive. Finally, though, it is the largeness of Munro’s wisdom that confirms her range.
Robert Towers in the New York Review of Books also treated Friend at some length and on an elevated plane: taking the book up with William Trevor’s Family Sins and Other Stories, he likened Munro’s work to Hardy’s and asserted that she is an expert at what James called foreshortening – “the art of creating an illusion of depth by bringing certain details forward for emphasis while allowing others to recede into the background.” The title story is a fine example of Munro’s use of this technique.
Among the British reviews, Patricia Craig’s in the Times Literary Supplement also pointed sharply at particularly effective techniques. Munro is “a specialist in odd-angled observation, telling detail, and the striking ways in which past and present slot into one another.” Friend “testifies to the supreme effectiveness of her search for connections – between one generation and its predecessors, between different modes of behaviour, or just between one thing and another.” She cited the beginning of “Pictures of the Ice” as an example of Munro’s audacity, of her invention. There we learn of Austin’s death in the first sentence, “Arresting, astringent, deft, idiosyncratic … you can’t avoid these adjectives while trying to characterize her work.”
Along with Salter’s, Carol Shields’s review of Friend in the London Review of Books stands out as one that brings a long perspective to the task. More than that, Shields writes with the perspective of one who has attempted, and succeeded at, much the same art as has Munro herself. In her case too, she writes with real knowledge of Munro as a person. The two had met in the 1970s and, though Shields was only a few years younger, her fiction is usually seen as coming after, and being influenced by, Munro’s. Recalling her first reading of Shields’s Small Ceremonies, Munro commented, “You just get that shiver when you come across a real writer, and I had that with [this book].” Throughout, Munro was supportive of Shields’s work and career, writing references for her and providing quotations about her work. When Shields died after a long illness, Munro was among those quoted.
Not surprisingly, in her review of Friend Shields offered a detailed overview of Munro’s career, one that is confirmed further by the pleasures of the book at hand. The reader finds “on every page the particular satisfactions of prose that is supple, tart and spare, yet elegant and complex.” In the midst of this writing, Shields sees Munro “guarding, by means of her unpredictable cadences and spirited vocabulary, the particular salt and twang of rural Ontario – the corner of the universe that Munro calls home. Her voice is unmistakably her own. Artlessness collides with erudition in almost every paragraph, but in Munro’s hands these contradictions seem natural, just one more manifestation of a planet whose parts are unbalanced, mismatched, puzzling and random.” Like several other reviewers, Shields notices that in Friend the “time line moves all over the place.… Munro is good at handling long windy stretches of time, whole lifetimes or generations, and the stories here seem even bolder in this respect.… Many of the stories are cunningly hinged to moments in time: these stories draw breath from narrowly avoided accidents, the mock suicide, the almost tragedy, the near brush with happiness.” Working through her material, Munro “is careful about leaving keys. A reader can almost always find in the closing pages of a Munro piece a little silver ingot of compaction, an insight that throws light on the story. These sentences are often her most graceful, and they are skillfully embedded in the text, cushioned by the colloquialism and ease that define her writing.” Summing up Munro’s work, though not the book itself, Shields writes with precision that the “enchantment to be found in Munro’s books lies in the countless, vivid shocks of recognition between reader and writer.”
Such vivid shocks of recognition might be seen to characterize Friend of My Youth, certainly, but they also encompass the whole of Munro’s work during the 1980s. Like her narrator in “Meneseteung,” Munro may be seen focused on the day-to-day, wondering, seeing “this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.”33 Alice Munro’s progress continued, but with Friend of My Youth she most emphatically was Alice Munro.
“She’s Our Chekhov”
Open Secrets, Selected Stories, The Love of a Good Woman, 1990–1998
It was anarchy she was up against – a devouring muddle. Sudden holes and impromptu tricks and radiant vanishing consolations.
– “Carried Away”
The corn in tassel, the height of summer passing, time opening out with room for ordinary anxieties, weariness, tiffs, triviality. No more hard edges, or blamelessness, or fate buzzing around in your veins like a swarm of bees. Back where nothing seems to be happening, beyond the change of seasons.
– “What Do You Want to Know For?”
But Chekhov’s art is more than merely Chekhovian. It is dedicated to explicit and definitive portraiture and the muscular trajectory of whole lives. Each story, however elusive or broken off, is neverth
eless exhaustive – like the curve of a shard that implies not simply the form of the pitcher entire, but also the thirsts of its shattered civilization.
– Cynthia Ozick, “A Short Note on ‘Chekhovian’ ”
Munro’s most ubiquitous publisher’s blurb is one Cynthia Ozick made available to Ann Close some time in the late 1980s: “She is our Chekhov, and is going to outlast most of her contemporaries.” It first appeared above the flap copy in the Knopf Friend of My Youth; the first phrase ran on the back of the Canadian edition’s dust jacket; and it has been used to describe Munro’s reputation repeatedly since, quoted almost always with warm agreement. It was the only quotation Knopf used on the jacket of its Open Secrets and was the lead quotation on McClelland & Stewart’s. Ozick, who had met Munro and read with her in New York when Moons was published by Knopf in 1983, had contributed “A Short Note on ‘Chekhovian’ ” to a volume of The Tales of Chekhov in 1985. A wide-ranging novelist, essayist, and reviewer, she had been thinking about the Russian master’s stories, his work: “We feel Chekhov’s patience, his clarity – his meticulous humanity, lacking so much as a grain of malevolence or spite,” she wrote. “He is an interpreter of the underneath life, even when his characters appear to be cut off from inwardness.” Ozick concludes that “he teaches us us.” So too Munro, the late-twentieth-century Chekhov.
Throughout the 1990s the object of this consistent and unstinting adulation mostly just kept doing what she had always done: she wrote, she lived her life. Apart from occasional appearances in print in the New Yorker (and very occasionally elsewhere), and in person at a few public events, Munro kept pretty much to herself. During the late 1980s she and Fremlin had begun dividing their time between Clinton and Comox, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island. They were attracted to Comox for its ironic combination of good skiing and milder winters, eventually buying a condominium and spending some portion of the year there ever since. Reaching Comox and then returning home has allowed Munro and Fremlin to indulge one of their great shared pleasures, driving and investigating, back and forth across the continent. They have taken numerous routes for variety and interest’s sake.
Another pleasure Munro pursued during the 1990s was acting in theatrical fundraisers for the nearby Blyth Festival Theatre. A journalist quoted her speaking of the two productions she had been in: “ ‘In one play – both of them were murder mysteries – I was an aging but still sexually voracious professor of English,’ she says with a laugh. ‘And in another, I played a lady writer who comes into the library and demands to know if any of her books are available. I loved it.’ ” When the journalist asked her why she would do this since she was well known for avoiding publicity connected with her writing, Munro’s response was interesting: “ ‘Well, that’s because I have to be me,’ she says to explain her dislike of such self-promotion. ‘With acting, I love the mask.’ ”
Daniel Menaker at the New Yorker, the Mysteries of Open Secrets
Munro’s life changed in other ways, too, as the 1990s began and she moved into another phase. As she approached her sixtieth year, her health became more of an issue – just after Friend was published, Munro went into hospital for an operation, and during the decade other medical concerns, including some heart problems, were treated. In August 1990 her daughter Sheila married, and in July of 1991 Jenny did as well. Munro became a grandmother when Sheila and her husband had their first son, James, in 1991, and he was followed in 1995 by his brother, Thomas. As it happened, Sheila and her family settled in Powell River, British Columbia – on the mainland just across from Comox, with a ferry route connecting the two – so for part of each year Munro was able to see her grandsons regularly and to watch them grow.
In the literary world, Munro’s career seemed also to enter a new phase after Friend was published. In the fall of 1990 Munro won the $10,000 Trillium Award from the Province of Ontario for that book and, at the same time, Munro and Friend were shortlisted for the $40,000 Aer Lingus Irish Times Literary Award; the other nominees were Russell Banks, A.S. Byatt, and John Mickelhern. She did not win that one, but she did win the $50,000 1990 Canada Council Molson Prize for “outstanding lifetime contributions to the cultural and intellectual life of Canada.” In August 1991 Munro was named a regional winner for Canada and the Caribbean of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Friend of My Youth. In May 1994 she received the Order of Ontario and, in 1995, the £10,000 W.H. Smith Award for the best book in the United Kingdom for Open Secrets. In September 1995 she received a $50,000 Lannan Foundation Literary Prize, given since 1989 to writers “whose work is of exceptional quality.” While some of these awards were for particular books, there was also the evident sense that they were being made as much for the body of Munro’s work as for any individual book. In the same 1994 profile in which Munro talks about her acting for the Blyth Festival, Diane Turbide wrote, “ ‘The incomparable Alice Munro,’ as a New York Times critic recently described her, ‘is not just a good writer but a great one, the first Canada has produced.’ ”
In the same piece Turbide quotes Menaker on Munro: “She’s a distinctive, original and complex voice.… And the things she says with that voice – her stories – are vastly interesting and complicated, and work on every single level that you would ask a piece of writing to work on. She has very few equals in the entire history of short fiction – I feel very sure about that.”1 When he said that, Menaker had just left the New Yorker to work at Random House. Having been completely enthusiastic about Munro’s stories from the time McGrath got them from Barber and brought them to the magazine, Menaker had been the logical replacement editor once McGrath took up other work there. Menaker was her editor from 1988 through most of 1994; he handled five of the seven stories first published in the New Yorker from Friend of My Youth and all seven of those in Open Secrets.
The last Munro story Menaker edited was “The Albanian Virgin.” It grew out of Munro’s pursuit of the circumstances of a Clinton librarian named Minnie Rudd, who had been “captured – c. 1900 – by ‘bandits in Albania,’ ” as she wrote to Metcalf in early 1988. In some significant ways that story encapsulates what might be seen as Munro’s second phase as a New Yorker writer, a time when she was well established there while changes occurred within the magazine itself. McGrath shifted to other responsibilities as the new editor Gottlieb’s deputy, and Menaker became Munro’s editor as 1988 began; he finally met her in New York about that time, despite their decade-old connection. Menaker continued as her editor – and that of numerous other authors besides – through the transition from Gottlieb to Tina Brown, the young Englishwoman who had previously transformed Vanity Fair, and who was made editor of the New Yorker in 1992 to effect the same transformation there. As editor, she set about changing the magazine in myriad ways, striving to make it more topical, cutting the space devoted to fiction by half, introducing photography, creating what was always called “buzz” around the magazine. Radically, too, she began running stories signed on the first page rather than the last, long the magazine’s custom.
“The Albanian Virgin” ran as the centrepiece of a “buzz” double issue called “The New Yorker Celebrates Fiction,” one that included five other stories, a piece by Roger Angell on what makes a New Yorker story, selections from past New Yorker stories, and various other fiction-connected items. Most strikingly, there was a “portfolio” of photographs of fourteen New Yorker authors by staff photographer Richard Avedon; in May 1994 most of them had come to New York for a party and to be photographed, Munro among them. There their images are, standing side-by-side with varying expressions of seriousness and rapt delight, spread across seven pages. Describing the circumstances producing the images, Menaker wrote that “Bobbie Ann Mason was startled and flattered to learn that Alice Munro and her husband had travelled through western Kentucky because they admired her work and wanted to see the region her stories describe. Tom Drury – along with nearly everyone else, it seemed – was delighted to meet Alice Munro at last; they had been carr
ying on a lively correspondence for months.” The shared delight at meeting Munro stemmed, probably, from her own buzz. Because she avoided the literary limelight in favour of Clinton, Comox, and driving with Fremlin, she was seen as something of a literary enigma.
While she had little specific sense of the magazine’s relations with its writers, and perhaps did not know much about Munro, Tina Brown saw the June 27 and July 4 1994 all-fiction issue as a chance to draw attention to the New Yorker’s distinguished record as a publisher of fiction. With its party and pictures, and a hyperbolic cover showing the figure of Liberty, fireworks behind, extending her arms over a group of famed American writers each holding her or his major book, the issue really was a celebration of fiction. Ironically, given this patriotic imagery, Munro’s “The Albanian Virgin” served as the issue’s centrepiece, and the portfolio of pictures is followed immediately by her Canadian story.
Alice Munro Page 51