Josephine Humphreys, in the New York Times Book Review’s lead review, begins with “Carried Away” and asserts that all the stories in Munro’s book “are lessons. Ms. Munro’s work has always been ambitious and risky precisely because it dares to teach, and by the hardest, best method: without giving answers.” Continuing with “Carried Away,” Humphreys writes of Jack Agnew’s decapitation at Douds that “few writers would dare such a move, and fewer still could make it work. But Ms. Munro does. The narrative fabric into which this horrible event is woven is tight with a sense of time and place, a solid realism that allows even the bizarre to appear normal.” In the world of these stories, though, “some parts of life aren’t quickly apprehendable through language” so that “the open secrets, near-at-hand mysteries that can’t readily be talked or written into clarity” abound. Munro focuses on such secrets, weaving their meaning into her characters’ lives, with audacious technique: “Every story in the collection contains some sort of startling leap, whether it’s a huge jump forward in time (more than 100 years in ‘A Wilderness Station’), a geographical change (as in ‘The Jack Randa Hotel’ …) or a sudden switch in viewpoint that changes the whole nature of the story.… By thus expanding – you might even say exploding – the fictional context, Ms. Munro reaches toward difficult truths.” She is able to do so because of her acute sensibility: “It’s no coincidence that almost every story in ‘Open Secrets’ has as its time frame the span of an entire life, for these stories draw upon the complexity of a mature, long-vigilant sensibility.” Maintaining that “fiction is the telling that startles, the telling that teaches,” Humphreys concludes: “Heedless of convention, hazarding everything, firmly convincing us of the unseen good despite acknowledging our fears and harrowing experiences, ‘Open Secrets’ is a book that dazzles with its faith in language and in life.”
As with Woodcock’s review, Canadian critics assumed longstanding familiarity with Munro and with her work, a familiarity leading to a certain daunted quality in their assessments. Sharon Butala, in the Globe and Mail, begins by asking “Can Alice Munro fail?” and continues to write that when she read “The Albanian Virgin” in the New Yorker she thought Munro had, “but when I read it as one of eight stories in her new collection, Open Secrets, I realized it as necessary, even inevitable and in a sense the keystone of the collection.” Having established her own writing from the mid-1980s on, Butala adopts a mystified tone toward Munro’s work: “With each of her eight books I’ve grown more fascinated and more puzzled by her stories. They seem to me not written by a living human hand, more like the words carved on an ancient tomb, hidden for centuries from human eyes, till an archeologist unearths it, brushes away the dirt, and reveals the words that have always been there.” With this collection, Butala claims, she “saw at last how to read” Munro’s work: “In story after story she has given us glimpses of what lies buried beneath the façade of respectability and ‘normal’ lives.” Many reviewers, Butala among them, paid especial attention to “The Albanian Virgin” because of its apparent singularity within Munro’s work, set so far away from Huron County. Yet the story’s exotic locale and Hollywood-style plot are entwined with the quotidian details of a “normal” not disconnected from Munro’s own history: the narrator, left by her husband in London, Ontario, over her adulterous transgressions, moves to Victoria in the 1960s and opens a bookstore. She longs for Nelson, the lover she has herself left behind in London, hearing the story of the Albanian Virgin from Charlotte, a woman she has come to know through the store. As Munro told a reporter for the New York Times, “The two stories combined there are a romantic fairy tale and a sort of romance worked out in real life.” Acknowledging this, Butala calls Open Secrets “too good to be called merely brilliant: It is a marvel.… Munro treats the women of these stories with tenderness and honesty while she shines a merciless light on their (and our) pasts, to make us see what we forgot when we chose real lives.”
Reaching much the same conclusion (“Munro reveals the exhilarating character of life itself”) in Books in Canada, Tim Struthers notices the reference to Thomas Hardy in “Carried Away” and writes that “like Hardy, in one magnificent volume of fiction after another, Munro is able to explore with increasing graveness and love, with increasing precision and wonder, the complexities of the human condition.” Without the literary antecedent, most reviewers in the popular press struck similar chords. Munro’s work, David Holmstrom wrote in the Christian Science Monitor, has “the hallmark of surprise, of creating such sharp twists in the lives of seemingly ordinary women and men that her fiction comes loaded with important, timeless questions hiding in the narrative.” In Time, R.Z. Sheppard quotes Louisa’s apprehension at the end of the story of life as “a devouring muddle,” in Munro’s phrase, and continues, “It takes some living to get to this insight. Other than Munro’s considerable talent, the only constants in these stories are remorseless time and blind fate.” Malcolm Jones, Jr., holds in Newsweek that “Munro’s wonderfully compressed tales are not easily summarized” since each of them “contains enough Dickensian detail to flesh out a lesser writer’s novel.” Citing instances and details, Jones comments too that “the bold assurance with which Munro works carries with it an implied sense of risk. It is a challenge so seductive, with everything on the line, that you can’t help but take her up on it. So every time you egg her on. And every time she pulls it off, leaving us slack-jawed with wonder and filled with delight.”
Beyond the superlatives of the response to Open Secrets, there is also the sense that in Munro her readers have a writer who transcends the narrowly provincial, ironically, by knowing her home place so well and focusing so unerringly on its details, its textures. Thus Ann Hurlbert in the New York Review of Books:
In Carstairs – more joltingly than in its predecessors Jubilee, Hanratty, Dalgleish – Munro is preoccupied with disconnections and unpredictable, implausible reconnections between then and now, between here in town and there beyond it. In turn, the jaggedness of the juxtaposition doesn’t feel predictably postmodern: more than a sense of relativist muddle, there is a sense of miracle in the transformations that have taken place.…
She betrays no sense of the defensive insecurity about her region’s place on the map that Margaret Atwood has called the “the great Canadian victim complex.” On the contrary, the particular, peripheral sense of place that inspires her fiction gives her the assurance to matter-of-factly take up an especially large theme, the disorienting power of time.
Defining Munro as “a regional writer without borders,” Hurlbert sees this quality most especially in “The Albanian Virgin,” which she regards as “a kind of symbolic culmination. In venturing so far from her traditional landscape, Munro has stumbled on a place in which her peculiar and powerful version of the provincial story meets a ritualized version of itself.” Following Lottar’s transformation from inopportune captive to Albanian virgin, Hurlbert acknowledges her escape but recognizes that it will lead to yet another: “As so often in Munro, the search for a new balance almost always means the discovery of new ambivalence.” For Munro, the intertwining of Lottar’s Hollywood-like story with the narrator’s more usual longing for Nelson is a way of achieving “jolts of recognition amid strangeness.” Hurlbert is mistaken in characterizing Munro’s choice of Albania as a “stumble,” however: as Munro made clear when speaking to Gzowski, she saw the parallel between the Albanians’ acceptance of virgins in their midst and her own society’s view of “old maids.” Both were set apart by their disavowal of sex.
Just as Munro foresaw, too, reviewers of Open Secrets paid particular attention to the ways she tells the stories it contains; many saw its stories as a new direction for her. In a long and careful review in the Nation, Ted Solotaroff comments that “both Munro and Carver have the authority of seeming to write directly from personal experience without the blind spots and obtrusiveness of the ego one finds in Hemingway or Cheever or Mary McCarthy.” He also writes that “Munro’
s imagination is constitutionally dialectical”; that is, each observation seems to imply its opposite. He observes further that “it’s remarkable how many times Munro can place a woman in a man’s shadow or have it cross her life at its dividing line without seeming to limit or repeat herself.” Sensing her own history from her writing, Solotaroff continues, “She taps a rich vein in the broken marriages of the sixties era (one survivor looks back at it ‘as though she had once gone in for skydiving’), but the madness they are escaping from or into comes in various shapes and depths.” (He might have quoted this question from “Vandals,” “But what was living with a man if it wasn’t living inside his insanity?”)
In her review in the New Republic, Wendy Lesser has much positive to say about the book but is also critical at various points. She says, for example, that “A Real Life” and “Spaceships Have Landed” are “like outtakes from an earlier Munro.” Lesser also takes exception to Munro’s description, in a Paris Review interview, of “The Jack Randa Hotel” as a story she wrote as “an entertainment.” Lesser quotes Munro’s remarks in that interview: in contrast to a story like “Friend of My Youth,” which “ ‘works at my deepest level,’ ” Munro said, “The Jack Randa Hotel” feels “ ‘lighter to me.… I don’t feel a big commitment to’ ” these stories. This comparison is problematic, Lesser says, because in Open Secrets “Munro is venturing into new terrain: the terrain of the fantastical, the psychologically introverted, the purely suppositional.” She continues in a passage that gets right to the heart of Munro’s transformation:
No story in Open Secrets has the intense visceral solidity of most of Munro’s earlier work, the feel and texture of experienced reality evident in her partly autobiographical novel, Lives of Girls and Women, and in collections such as The Progress of Love and The Moons of Jupiter. These days she is no longer remembering, but guessing or imagining; and her material tends now to be the history of others – researched or overheard, contemplated, explored, added to – rather than her own immediate personal history.
Lesser is overstating her case, but she has apprehended just the shift Munro spoke of to Gzowski and which is apparent in Open Secrets. Writing these stories, Munro was still very much remembering, but those memories come largely in the details. The cores of these stories lie, as Lesser rightly asserts, in the guessing and the remembering. Lesser also notices a telling incidental appearance of Louisa’s daughter, Bea Doud – the central character in “Vandals” – in “Carried Away.” Quoting the passages in question, she asks what amounts to a crucial succession of questions about Munro’s narrative technique: “Who is telling us this, and what is her relation either to us (the audience) or Bea (the actor)? Can we trust her on things? Is something being kept from us? Is there a verifiable truth here, or is someone just imagining it all?” All fair questions, though largely unanswerable ones. As Marlene Goldman and Teresa Heffernan wrote in “Letters in Canada 1994” in the University of Toronto Quarterly, “Often just as the narrative reaches its climax, promising to explain the life of the character or the logic of a dramatic event, it quickly recedes, retracting its promise; the event quietly fades, swept up in a blur of new events and buried by the future.”
Julia O’Faolain in the Times Literary Supplement also notes that several of Munro’s “new stories here pivot on reality’s slipperiness – in the light of which, realism can only be a convention and a willed distortion. All the better, we may feel, since it is by distorting that writers share their vision. It is for the distortion that we read. Besides, Alice Munro does not impose her views, but leaves us wondering.” Closing her review in the Canadian Forum, Myrna Summers surveyed Open Secrets and Munro’s work more generally and wrote that “we read her with exhilaration, whatever her subject, and a hundred years from now, I believe that there will be every bit as much reason to read her work as there is to read Chekhov today.”5
The focus of all this, the writer herself, missed most of these kudos since, for the first time, she decided not to read the book’s reviews. She told Gzowski that she had heard that Doris Lessing never saw her reviews and decided “to try it this time.… I thought I’d experiment to see what it did for my mental health.” However busy and otherwise directed she was, seeing and hearing about her reviews worried her and put her off her day. So while others told her about some of the reviews of Open Secrets, Munro ignored them and went on living her life.
As had then become her custom, Munro limited her engagements to three or four events surrounding the book’s publication. She went on Morningside on September 30 and, on October 7, read along with Robertson Davies at a gala celebration of the two pre-eminent writers published by Douglas Gibson Books. The reading was sponsored by the Harbourfront Reading Series and McClelland & Stewart and was held in a thousand-seat auditorium at the North York Performing Arts Centre. A press announcement from the reading series asserted that this “historic literary event … marks Alice Munro’s first public reading in Toronto in five years, and her only Toronto appearance this year.” The Toronto Star ran a story on the reading calling Munro and Davies “two of the country’s most beloved authors” and noting that they were reading together “for the first time in their careers.” While regular tickets were $20 and $15, for $100 seventy-five people got a preferred seat and signed copies of Open Secrets and Davies’s novel, The Cunning Man, in a Harbourfront Reading Series canvas book bag. Munro was to follow this up with two other events in Toronto at the end of October and early November and, once she was in Comox, read as part of the Vancouver International Writers Festival on February 5.
On November 2 Munro was scheduled to attend the first presentation of the Giller Prize, a $25,000 prize for Canadian fiction established in 1995 by Jack Rabinovitch to honour his late wife, Doris Giller. Along with Mordecai Richler and University of Ottawa professor David Staines, Munro served as a juror to choose the first recipient. Munro credited Staines’s powers of persuasion (once saying it was a good thing he did not want her to be a drug runner) but it was widely thought she agreed so that Open Secrets would not be eligible, and so was not the first winner. M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets won, but Munro, who served only on the inaugural jury, went on to win the prize in 1998 for The Love of a Good Woman and, in 2004, for Runaway. That Munro was sought out for the first jury is an apt illustration of just how she was seen as Canada’s major author. Along with Richler’s, her presence on the jury gave the Giller Prize immediate prominence.
Owing to illness, Munro was not able to attend the first Giller presentation – though in January 1994 she had attended the gathering for the prize’s public announcement where, Staines recalls, she was the only person the press wanted to speak to. On that same trip, she met with Gibson and they agreed on the ordering of the stories in Open Secrets. By the time the prize was awarded, her book was in the bookstores and selling extremely well. In January 1995 Gibson wrote Munro that “by the end of the year” Open Secrets had “ ‘sold’ 33,000 copies in the bookstores, with a further 3,500 going to the Book of the Month Club.” Gibson put “sold” in quotation marks because he knew there would be some returns, “but our sense is that by the end of the day Open Secrets is going to have sold over 30,000 copies in Canadian bookstores, which is an astonishing achievement for such a fine literary work that contains not one single car chase or attempt to over-throw the U.S. Presidency.” (The final sales figure in Canada was much better than he expected: 38,530 with another 7,070 through the Book-of-the-Month Club.) Open Secrets was moving well in the United States too, given its presence on the New York Times bestseller list and, in the same letter, Gibson congratulates Munro on the W.H. Smith Award in Britain “given to the best book of the year, fiction, non-fiction or poetry, so the honour is all the greater for that.” Beyond prizes, it is worth noting, too, that as it was published in English Open Secrets had been or was being translated for publication into French, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Spanish. Most of her previous books offered a similar list of translation
s; Friend of My Youth was not in Norwegian, but it was in Danish, Dutch, Japanese, and Swedish. By 1996 Munro’s work had been translated into thirteen different languages.6
Making Selected Stories
In its May 1994 issue Books in Canada published an article, “In Search of Alice Munro” by David Creighton, which suggests how Munro was being seen in Canadian letters just before Open Secrets was published. Neither a profile nor a review, the piece is based on Creighton’s excursion to Wingham, Clinton, and Blyth to look at Munro’s home place for himself, to identify the places she had described, to make contact with some people in Wingham who remembered her living there. The article is illustrated with photographs: Wingham’s town hall, the family home, the Maitland River, the Lyceum theatre, a monument to the Huron Tract pioneers, a coffee shop, the former post office now the museum, the Wingham branch of the Royal Canadian Legion. By the 1990s literary types were talking about something called “Munroviana” (in Creighton’s article it is “Munrovia”) and, more widely, people were beginning to refer to Huron County as “Alice Munro Country.” Like Hardy’s Wessex, Cather’s Nebraska, Faulkner’s Mississippi, or Laurence’s Neepawa, Munro’s Huron County was being seen as a mythic place, a literal place made magical by its rendering in Alice Munro’s fiction. Creighton’s article is indicative of as much. Its impulse was furthered in 2000 by the creation of a self-guided “Alice Munro Tour” of Wingham available at the North Huron District Museum. In 2002, the Alice Munro Literary Garden was dedicated beside that museum.7
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