More than this, “Love” is connected to “Cortes Island,” the third story in the collection, which begins “Little bride. I was twenty years old, five feet seven inches tall, weighing between a hundred and thirty-five and a hundred and forty pounds, but some people – Chess’s boss’s wife, and the older secretary in his office, and Mrs. Gorrie upstairs, referred to me as a little bride. Our little bride, sometimes. Chess and I made a joke of it, but his public reaction was a look fond and cherishing. Mine was a pouty smile – bashful, acquiescent.” Here, Munro was describing herself and her own situation in 1952 – this “little bride” writes (“filling page after page with failure”) while her husband is at work, and lives on Arbutus Street in Vancouver looking out at English Bay. Autobiographical connections abound throughout the stories in The Love of a Good Woman, though, as Munro casually said in her contributor’s note about “Love,” “it all went on in Huron County” – she marshalled the facts and situations she needed to create the image and action she was after, and used them to great effect.
As usual, McClelland & Stewart and Knopf each printed its own edition of The Love of a Good Woman from the Knopf typesetting. The book was set during May and, judging by the proofs available in the Calgary archives, Munro made a considerable number of changes throughout the first pass. (Although some stories were set from New Yorker pages, “The Children Stay” was set from a typescript dated “February 21/98” by Munro – after the story had been in the magazine, restoring its cuts.)
The Canadian edition of Love was published in late September, the U.S. in November. Gibson was especially keen to ensure exact timing on a late September publication date to meet the deadlines for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s prize – he wrote to Close in mid-May about this, saying that he was “confident that Alice will win this year – perhaps even be a double winner. So the stakes are high here for our getting the book out in September.” This was true enough but, beyond prizes, Gibson expected Love to take a large step up in Canadian sales – it did, for by June 1999 there had been five printings of about 60,000 copies. Munro’s advance on Canadian earnings for the book had gone to $70,000. The book’s Canadian dust jacket illustration was Paul Peel’s Le repos while Knopf used a vintage photograph (1920s or 1930s) of a man paddling a woman in a canoe.
While the book was in production during the spring and into the summer, Munro was feeling poorly – heart problems were vexing her by this point. Both in 1997 and again in 1998, Greg Gatenby, director of the Harbourfront writers series, sought to arrange a tribute to Munro as Harbourfront Author of the Year. She turned it down the first time. Early the next year Gibson raised the possibility once more with Barber, who reported back in early March that Munro had again refused, this time explicitly for health reasons since the nervousness brought on by such events took a real toll. As things turned out, though, Munro agreed to a dual reading with Jack Hodgins (who also had a Gibson book that fall) to cap the Harbourfront series on October 31. It was the second time Hodgins had read with her in this way and, once again, she upstaged him – not by anything she did but by simply being the person and writer she is. “Last night,” a newspaper account reported, “1,200 people rose to their feet in a standing ovation for what Alice Munro says will be her final literary public appearance. ‘Absolutely my last reading,’ she had said earlier over dinner.…” Munro said she had told Gerry Fremlin as much when he drove her to the train that morning, and he claimed to have “heard that before.” The reporter set Hodgins’s work and his reading early in her article but admitted that “Munro, three-time Governor-General’s Award winner and the front-runner for the Giller prize” to be announced that week “was the big draw.” Not exempted by sitting on its jury this time, Munro and her book did win the Giller but, amid some controversy, The Love of a Good Woman was not even shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. Munro and Love did, however, win the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in the United States, making her the first native-born Canadian to do so. (Illinois-born Carol Shields had won the award previously, as had Toni Morrison, Jane Smiley, and Frank McCourt, among others.)13
McClelland & Stewart published a poster promoting The Love of a Good Woman, which included this quotation from “The Children Stay” under a picture of Munro: “So her life was falling forward, she was becoming one of those people who ran away. A woman who shockingly and incomprehensibly gave everything up. For love, observers would say wryly. Meaning, for sex. None of this would happen if it weren’t for sex.” Pauline’s moment here, her life-changing decision to leave her husband, Brian, and their children for what turns out to be a short-term fling, does embody the sorts of moments Munro creates and contextualizes in Love. Returning for a second Munro review in the Globe and Mail, A.S. Byatt begins by asking, “Do we experience life as a continuum or as a series of disconnected shocks and accidents?” She then writes briefly of Munro’s early work, noting that in Love Munro “seems to be looking” at her characters’ lives “from further away. The lovingly described human lives come and go in flashes, punctuated by disaster.” Byatt then methodically works her way through some of the stories, noting that in both titles “Rich as Stink” and “The Children Stay,” “the phrase is brisk, colloquial and perfectly natural. In both cases, as part of Alice Munro’s precise and subtle writing, the phrase resonates, morally and esthetically, throughout its story.” “The children stay,” Byatt wrote, “is a perfect example of ambiguity.” As it embodies what happened to Pauline, as it embodies the whole of her characters’ lives in the story – the staying of children who never do stay but also do stay, in various ways, as they go – Munro’s phrase captures her effect.
Byatt’s review of Love is one of three appearing in Canada, each by another woman writer, that bear special notice. Addressing “Save the Reaper,” one of Munro’s strangest and most telescopic stories, ever, Byatt describes Munro’s complex handling of time and suggests that “only another writer, perhaps, could know how difficult that pace was to direct and control.” Concluding, Byatt draws attention to one of the stories first published in Love, “My Mother’s Dream,” and seems almost to exclaim: “Consider the effect, as you read this comic, moving, and wild tale, of the choice of the baby herself as the narrator, describing the dead show-off and obsessed artist stopped in her tracks. Who but Alice Munro could have turned the moral and drama of a tale on the choice made by a speechless infant lost under a sofa, and made the reader feel that something had been achieved and understood, against the odds?” As here, Byatt noticed particular details and described just how she saw them as effective. By contrast, Jane Urquhart in the Ottawa Citizen does something of the same but mostly just describes the stories and gushes her admiration (“And what rich canvases they are!”). Love, she concludes, is an “extraordinary achievement which, while it in no way diminishes her earlier work, takes the genius of her insight to yet another level.”
The third review of Love by another woman writer in a Canadian publication was Aritha van Herk’s “Between the Stirrup and the Ground” in the Canadian Forum. It, along with Michael Gorra’s in the New York Times Book Review, concedes Munro’s accomplishment and genius but then sharply analyzes this writer’s relation to her audience – together, these two brief reviews capture her position in fall 1998. Van Herk begins by writing that “readers approach a new volume of stories by Alice Munro with an awe that arguably no other writer in Canada inspires.” A bit snidely, van Herk has critics on their knees, editors genuflecting, and readers clutching the new Munro book; with more than a hint of a sneer, she notes that many of its stories “have already appeared in The New Yorker, that arbiter of excellence for all Canadian writing.” The reasons for such reactions are complex, van Herk knows, but she wonders if “a Munro story rehearses the suspicion that everything we value in Canadian culture is inherited from the 1950s.… Certainly, a volume by Munro offers none of the zesty spike of the unknown, none of the crisp window of the previously un-encountered
. Hers is a territory we recognize, a space we are complicit with.” Concluding her preamble, van Herk asks if Munro’s fiction is “a yardstick for Canada’s sense of self?”
To answer this question, in stark contrast to Urquhart’s gushings about Munro as a “national treasure,” she probes the world Munro delimits with a sharp critical eye. “Reading Munro is akin to opening an album of black and white photographs and remembering the names of maiden aunts and lecherous cousins otherwise forgotten.” Though she notes the feeling of the 1950s running through these stories, van Herk is at her best in describing atmosphere and character: “Munro evokes intensely claustrophobic atmospheres with tonal precision. A sinister stone of judgement weighs heavily on these stories and their characters. The world portrayed is hypocritical; every ordinary face masks a monster.” True enough, but van Herk also makes an essential point about Munro, and about her work, that is too seldom made: “Snide class judgements are frequent.” Although Munro early achieved a middle-class way of living through family aspiration, study, and marriage, her Lower Town Wingham upbringing has never left her – it echoes throughout her work.
While it is possible to read van Herk’s review as one writer disdaining the subject and method of another more successful one, that is giving it too short a shrift. Placing Munro’s later work within a defined context of Canadian culture, not giving in to the dominant gush, is a fair approach for any reviewer, but especially one writing in the nationalist Canadian Forum. Yet even though van Herk announces such matters in her preamble, she ultimately reviews the vision of humanity Munro herself offers rather than any nationalist concerns. She writes at one point, “There is a surface, and then there is the nether world below. And in Munro’s world that substratum inevitably collaborates with all that is ‘deliberately vile.’ ” Given this, “perhaps our fascination with Munro’s fiction is that she is really a virtuoso of domestic horror.” So van Herk concludes:
These characters discover that they know more than they believe they know, and that knowledge, with its hungers and satisfactions, will enable them to survive every crucible. The hallucinatory extravagance that infects these stories is indeed akin to love of a good woman. Such a love goes beyond the gothic, to a grotesque realm that is almost hilarious – if it were not so horribly horrible.
If van Herk’s precise review places and examines Love in an explicitly Canadian context, then Michael Gorra’s does the same thing in an explicitly American one. Like her, too, Gorra writes with a discerning critical sharpness that illumines the artist and art at hand in ways compelling and complete. Beginning, Gorra notes that Munro “most always presents her men as seen by women, [but] though she is no more interested in the lives of men than Conrad was in those of women, I would hesitate to call her a feminist writer.” Citing Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” he comments that Munro’s “work never feels as though it has had the question of gender thrust upon it,” and in this it differs from Lessing, or Morrison, or Woolf. More than this, Gorra likens Munro to Flannery O’Connor as a regionalist, a writer “whose achievement she may now have outstripped.” This comparison ultimately collapses for him, though, since Munro writes from “a radically different formal imperative” than O’Connor: “Munro’s feel for her own characters is, in contrast, as pure as Chekhov’s and as unviolated by any appeal to an external system of thought.”
Like that sense in Munro’s work, Gorra feels a very great deal of accurate biographical information about this author by reading these stories well and by knowing the work of other writers. Commenting that there is no new territory in Love – “the moral geography of her fiction remains as familiar as its physical one” – he notes that “only one of these stories is rooted in the present, and though an element of retrospection has always been prominent in her work, never before has she seemed so autumnal, so concerned with mediating between the way we live now and the way we lived then.” Noting that most of the stories take place around 1960 so that, read together, “they so reinforce one another as to amount to the portrait of a generation: a generation that came to adulthood with one set of rules and then found it could live with another; a generation of women through whom the great turn of our times first quickened into life.” Continuing, in prescient though quite accurate fashion, Gorra writes before fastening on to “Cortes Island”:
The dates tell me that this is Munro’s own generation. But her stories never feel autobiographical. And yet nothing here looks like a performance, either, a voice put on or ventriloquized. Her work has a motion that seems as natural as walking. As natural? Better say as complicated, and then add that these stories walk not only forward but backward and sideways as well. They are never just about one character, one situation. They open out, always, into other lives and other moments.
Summarizing details from Munro’s story narrated by the “Little Bride,” Gorra notes that there the narrator “casually and briefly evokes her own later married life – ‘the first house we owned, the second house … Until the last which I entered with inklings of disaster and the faintest premonitions of escape.’ ” There is no reason for Gorra to know it as he reads this passage, it is impressive enough that he senses it, but we know that this narrator’s words here were born in Munro’s own move into the house on Rockland in Victoria, her third daughter Andrea about to be born, she herself not much liking the place, not wanting to live there. Focused on this moment, not knowing but apprehending its autobiographical beginning, Gorra writes that at such moments “Munro’s work has the dazzling but utter simplicity of Wordsworth who, in lyrics like ‘The Two April Mornings’ and ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,’ could collapse one moment, one memory, into another with an unrivaled combination of clarity and subtlety.”
Two more points in Gorra’s excellent review are worth noting. To end it he writes that “nothing in this volume is finer than its long title story.” Contrasting its structure to what he calls “the formal balance” of “Jakarta,” Gorra describes the circumstances of the three boys who discover Mr. Willens’s body submerged in his little blue Austin (the Munros owned an Austin in the 1960s) and writes: “We never make it back to the boys on whom Munro spent the story’s first 30 pages. But that structural dissonance, that enormous loose end, is precisely what makes the story’s conclusion seem so large and enigmatic.” Second, Gorra writes that “long ago, Woolf described George Eliot as one of the few writers ‘for grown-up people.’ The same might today, and with equal justice, be said of Alice Munro.”
Given the precision and thought with which van Herk and Gorra analyzed The Love of a Good Woman, their reviews certainly warrant the detailed attention featured here, but the book consistently drew excellent analysis wherever one looks. In Time, R.Z. Sheppard maintained that “it’s Munro’s quality, not her quantity, that puts her in the company of today’s most accomplished writers” and he likens her “balance of compassion and detachment [to] Minerva, the goddess of wisdom.” In the Yale Review Michael Frank, reviewing the book along with Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America, discusses Enid’s nursing of Mrs. Quinn in the title story, writing, “It is all so authentic, so subtle, so felt – the woman, the house, the children, the smell. Past and present join in a slow summery swirl of heat and dying. The reader has forgotten all about the opening – until, quite casually, Mrs. Quinn one day asks Enid if she went to Mr. Willens funeral when he drowned.” Focusing on the boy in “Save the Reaper” – a character, one notes, who reprises in age and perspective the narrator in “Images” – Frank discusses Munro’s concern for the “private work of storing and secreting, deciding on the meaning of one’s own experience: this young boy is at the beginning of the journey Munro sends all her characters on, in all her stories.… She believes in the revelation of meaning,” Frank concludes, and so her stories stay with a reader who has scrutinized them: “So powerful an afterlife is central to the sustaining magic of Alice Munro.”
Barbara Croft, in the Women’s Review of Books, focuses sharply on the book at
hand, writing that “Munro permits herself the latitude of a novelist, and the resulting stories achieve an extraordinary depth and range.” Croft offers a metaphor that, while a bit hackneyed, still applies:
These stories are like a flock of birds in flight. Separate, often disparate-seeming, elements are swept along by the energy of the narrator’s voice. We feel a kind of magnetic force holding the characters and incidents together, but it’s never clear, until the very end, just how these elements are linked. The moment of revelation is achieved quietly, often with an image from nature or a short, simple line of exposition.
Croft concludes, “These are amazing stories.… On the surface, they seem almost artless, meandering and random, cluttered with detail. But they will haunt you.”
In Britain, reviews were of much the same cast though, as usual, a bit more distant. Referring to Munro’s women, an unnamed reviewer in the Economist notes that “accidental revelations, nightmares … barge into their lives – parodic, unbidden, unwanted reflections of the everyday.… The cost, of course, is an inner loneliness.” Elizabeth Lowry, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, sees Munro’s talent as extremely fine but ultimately limited – she does not buy comparisons to Proust and Chekhov, although she feels Munro’s abilities in writing “Canadian Gothic” are unique. Noting that “the dazzlingly exact specificity of the prose is deceptive, promising a solid world that is in fact highly unstable,” Lowry disputes with Munro who, she says, “remains uneasily convinced that love – the getting of love, the keeping of love, the loss of love, the getting over the loss of love – is the central fact of female experience.” This, effectively, is Munro’s limitation. Tamsin Todd in the New Statesman wonders about Munro’s reputation: “There are a good many slice-of-life writers out there, [but] this isn’t enough to explain why Munro is anthologized, collected, offered up in classrooms as a master of the short story. So what’s the big deal about Alice Munro?” Todd sees the answer in the details: “Part of the experience in reading the eight stories here is to be overwhelmed by detail.… Hers are more than slice-of-life stories, concerned not only with depicting life, but with the possible paths a life (and a story) can take.… Like the teller of medieval morality tales, Munro leads readers along a winding path to those moments when the moral decisions that determine a shape of a life are made.”14 Like the other reviewers of Love, Todd certainly does come to see in these details the big deal about Munro.
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