Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  Working closely with Munro on a story, Treisman sees her in the same way her predecessors did: She is a writer who understands the process, knows an editorial improvement when she sees it, and works with her editor. Treisman said that, when going over a proof, Munro will go for pages agreeing to suggestions until, knowing just what she wants, she will refuse one, saying, “Well, I think I want to keep that.” Consistent with the example of the brief addition to “Open Secrets” Munro provided to Gibson, Treisman has said that “if you ask her for something, and you might be imagining something quite – not radical – but you might be thinking of a different ending. In fact, she’ll come back with just three lines, but she will have thought about them so carefully that those three lines will make the difference.” And finally Treisman, given her own Canadian experience, has tended to value Munro’s local resonances: “She is, in the best sense, a regional writer. She’s very, very grounded in the landscape, and in social mores, social exchanges which are vocal. She’s writing about very specific small-town life, which is similar to American small-town life, but it’s not the same.” In passing, too, Treisman commented that she “loves the fact” that Munro and Fremlin do “this drive back and forth every year wandering randomly through different small towns.”3

  Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage went into production early in 2001. There was little discussion of the ordering of the stories, although “Queenie” and “What Is Remembered” were reversed during the process; the two publishers produced books in their usual fashion, sharing typesetting but printing separately with different dust jackets. For this book’s jacket, Munro and Gibson decided to use Eve’s Delight, a colour etching by Sheila Laidlaw-Radford, Munro’s sister. Given the length of the book’s title, Knopf decided to forgo an image and just use type. As the book was being set and was well in to the process heading toward the printer, Munro once again called Gibson with a specific request about its production, though what she wanted was not so dramatic as it had been when she called about Who: “Doug, I understand that there’s a new recycled, environmentally friendly type of paper that can be used for books,” Gibson recalled Munro saying. “I’d like my book to be printed on it.” Although it took considerable doing, McClelland & Stewart gave Munro what she wanted, just as Macmillan had: the Canadian edition of Hateship bears the note “Forest Friendly” on its dust jacket. (Munro’s decision had a widespread impact on the Canadian book trade; many other authors and publishers have followed suit, and now a much higher proportion of books are being printed on recycled stock.) McClelland & Stewart published in October and by January had got 43,000 copies out. By mid-October the book was atop the Globe and Mail’s bestseller list. Knopf’s edition appeared in November; Chatto & Windus also published in November in Great Britain. The Knopf edition was anticipated the previous month in Publishers Weekly with this forecast: “Munro’s collections are true modern classics, as the 75,000 first printing of her latest attests. Expect vigorous sales.”

  Just before that forecast Publishers Weekly concluded its brief but categorical review, “The stories share Munro’s characteristic style, looping gracefully from the present to the past, interpolating vignettes that seem extraneous and bringing the strands together in a deceptively gentle windup whose impact takes the breath away. Munro has few peers in her understanding of the bargains women make with life and the measureless price they pay.” As with her books from the 1990s, Munro received a remarkable range of reviews for Hateship – broad in numbers and types of publications – and like those focused on the books of the previous decade, its reviews spend considerable effort trying to define just how her work is so very good, so very affecting.

  Singular among such reviews is Mona Simpson’s “A Quiet Genius” in the Atlantic Monthly, an extended personal meditation on what Munro’s work means to one reader and a somewhat grumpy assertion that it still needs to be better known. A writer herself, Simpson had met Munro when she came to New York for the U.S. launch of The Moons of Jupiter in 1983 and had interviewed her for The Paris Review. Simpson’s review of Hateship is published beneath a singular, now often quoted, cutline: “Alice Munro is the living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years.” Beginning by looking back on herself when she discovered Munro’s writing, in her twenties working in publishing in New York, Simpson wrote that she “read Alice Munro’s stories of adulterous wives, and country girls gutting turkeys, with the page-turning avidity of someone discovering her own true future.” She and a friend read them together, they “read them deeply personally, to learn how to live.” Thus in reviewing Hateship Simpson writes as a person who has been reading Munro for over twenty years, a person who has long seen her work as resonant, a person who has met Munro (twice, at least) and wants to differentiate between the person and the genius. “A Quiet Genius” is an indicative review: in it, Simpson more than persuades her readers of the importance of Munro’s work – to her personally and when compared to both Munro’s contemporaries and past masters of fiction. Simpson quotes Richard Ford, who says that he is “in awe of how she operates in the third person.… She manages to make that third person do more than anybody I’ve ever seen in my life.” For Simpson in Hateship, Munro’s “men and women … are now seen from the perspective of an adult watching the doings of kindergarten children. She is far beyond taking sides.” Like many reviewers, Simpson is drawn to “Family Furnishings,” a writer’s story that both echoes Munro autobiographically and is also quite fictional, and like other reviewers she fastens on a final image of the narrator, completely apart, not connected to anyone else, watching: “such happiness, to be alone.”

  Bronwyn Drainie, the first Canadian reviewer to weigh in, was also attracted to this story, writing in Quill & Quire that it “could be subtitled ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Cool Young Bitch.’ ” It is “the most disturbing story in the collection” and represents “the writer’s dilemma and the writer’s curse. The selfishness is necessary to the creativity, but it distances the writer from the very people she most wants and needs to impress.” Recalling the 1974 essay in which everything is “touchable and mysterious,” Drainie concludes that Munro “remains faithful to these two literary beacons, giving her readers clear, sensual realities to experience and then leaving them to wonder and ponder.”

  Toronto’s Globe and Mail again called on a well-known writer, in this case Ann Beattie, who steps back from Hateship and asks, “Who among us understands the way things are?” and continues, “The boy from the past may reappear, rendered unobtainable by fate (Nettles); one may search for a missing person only to realize that the person is a sort of escape artist from her own life, eluding herself as well as the pursuer (Queenie). Even furniture seems to have great mobility and to serve the same function as a character in many of these stories (the wonderful title story; Family Furnishings, Queenie). Furniture, for heaven’s sake: It’s larger than life and can’t be cast off! It would be funny, except that it carries the weight – is the weight – of the present-determining past.” Munro, she maintains in a passage that unknowingly picks up some of Ozick’s comments on Chekhov, “orients the reader toward realizing that a story is composed of pieces and shows us that shards, as well as neat slices, are necessary to complete the puzzle.”

  Not to be outdone, Toronto’s other national paper, the National Post, also commissioned a well-known writer, Anne Enright, to review Hateship. She begins by deprecating a view of Munro’s writing that holds it “wants to be liked.” That is, the writing is accessible. “The democratic ease with which she tells her stories and the transparent quality of her prose mean you can love her work without realizing quite how good it is. Once this simple and singular fact clicks – that she is a brilliant writer – you can never read her with the same relaxed companionship again.” Acknowledging the truth of this, Enright reviews Hateship and concludes, “She has gotten better. The vultures who circle over literary reputations must be getting pretty fed up with Alice Munro.” While Enr
ight has several perceptive things to say about individual stories, her sharpest point is a generalization about Munro’s art: “Sometimes it seems as though her work is all insight, but its greatness comes not just from letting us see inside a character. It comes from allowing us a larger view. Time and again, we pull back to see the image of a woman in a landscape, alone.”

  Merilyn Simonds, in the Montreal Gazette, contrasted Hateship to Love where she saw “a certain sadness, a despair” weigh its stories, “making them almost unbearable to read.… Her redeeming vision seemed to cloud.” Here “the tone is tougher, as if she’s rediscovered the fibre that gives resilience to the human heart.” Philip Marchand, in the Toronto Star, made something of the same point when he wrote that “some of Munro’s recent stories have been marked by so much withheld information that the effect has been a certain frustration for readers, as if the point of the story is known only to the angels and to Munro herself.” Like other reviewers, Marchand calls special attention to the last story in the collection, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” There Grant, a retired professor and longtime rué, ironically has to contend with his wife’s romance with another patient in the nursing home where she lives because of Alzheimer’s – in getting on, seemingly, with a new life, she has forgotten who Grant is.

  The novelist Thomas Wharton, in a fine review in the Edmonton Journal syndicated to other papers, begins by recalling a student of his in a writing class who argued that Munro’s stories were “too slow. ‘Why doesn’t she just get on with it?’ he wanted to know.” Disagreeing, Wharton argues that the stories in Hateship do “ ‘get on with it,’ but they do it in the way our lives do: with stops and starts and backtrackings and revelations, surprises that divert us from our intended path along unexpected branchings.” Wharton feels that, with Munro, it is important “not to read too much, too fast.” Central incidents in her stories are key, but beyond them “the stories trace the shape of a life.… Reading Alice Munro,” he concludes, “is a quiet reminder that, amid the big ideas, the big important books always in a rush to sum up ‘society as a whole,’ it is always the solitary, observing, ultimately unknowable self to whom life, and death, happen.” Striking a similar note in the Ottawa Citizen, the Scottish critic Catherine Lockerbie calls the stories in Hateship “wise and wry, true and endlessly moving,” writing also that they “achieve the only proper purpose of literature and art: to touch us more deeply and teach us more fully what it means to be human.”

  Not all Canadian reviewers were prepared to revel in Hateship. Candace Fertile in the Vancouver Sun argues that, “after dozens of stories, the style gets predictable and verges on self-parody.” There is also the question of audience: “Munro’s stories have increasingly become meaningful to a smaller group – generally, older women who grew up at a time when women’s options were severely limited.” And though Munro handles her material with real dexterity, “the ‘stifled woman’ theme and the generally negative view of men get a bit tiresome.” Fertile seems intent on spotting and poking at weaknesses, and like several other reviewers she is not taken by the title story. (Roughly the same number, though, see it as one of the best.)

  By the time of Hateship, Simpson’s assertions notwithstanding, there is little discernible material difference between Munro’s reviews in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain to see real differences in reputation in each country. True, in Canada there remains the matter of Munro as a “national treasure,” but in the United States and Great Britain her reputation was established sufficiently among critics so that reviewers are by and large focused on the same elements and show an equal deep appreciation. What is evident, and this is what makes Simpson’s piece so interesting, is that with this book foreign critics took the long view of Munro’s art that was already so familiar in Canada. Thus Jeff Giles in Newsweek begins by writing that Hateship “isn’t as good as her best work, but virtually nothing is.” Noting an unevenness, he maintains that the “best stories here resonate so deeply that the rest feel drab.” Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times begins by seeing Munro’s women as equivalent to Updike’s men, writing that she “has created tales that limn entire lifetimes in a handful of pages, tales whose emotional amplitude and keen sense of the mundane muddles of ordinary life have established her over the last three decades as one of the foremost practitioners of the short story.” Like other reviewers who have written on Munro’s previous books, Kakutani notices that the “people in this volume tend to be somewhat older versions of people we met in Ms. Munro’s earliest stories.” Noting especially “Nettles,” “Family Furnishings,” and “Post and Beam,” Kakutani asserts that “these tales have the intimacy of a family photo album and the organic feel of real life, and they give us portraits created not through willful artifice, but through imaginative sympathy and virtuosic craft.” The New York Times Book Review’s notice, by William H. Pritchard, does not especially stand out – uncharacteristically, in view of the prominence of his previous reviews there. Pritchard summarizes the stories well enough, and like many others he lingers on “Family Furnishings,” but Pritchard offers very little by way of differentiated insight.

  That certainly cannot be said of Lorrie Moore’s review in the New York Review of Books. Likening Munro’s insights into domesticity to those of Henry James, Moore offers this telling assessment:

  Unlike James, a permanent tourist in the land of marriage and romantic union – a subject endlessly suited to the short-story genre – Alice Munro is intimately informed about what actually goes on there, and it is but one of the many reasons she is (to speak historically, and to speak even, say, in a Russian or French or even Irish saloon, loudly and unarmed) one of the world’s greatest short story writers. As the writer Ethan Canin once said, “The stories of Alice Munro make everyone else’s look like the work of babies.”

  She is also interested in social class. And there is not one of her stories in this new book that does not put together characters with real if subtle class divisions between them. This Munro does with a neutral, unsentimental eye and limber sympathies.

  Moore anticipates disputation over which stories are the strongest and, quite rightly, she expects that “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” “may come under the most fire.” Yet she sees the title story as embarked on one of Munro’s “signature themes – the random, permanent fate brought about by an illusion of love.” Luxuriating in Munro’s style, Moore writes that the ending of “Nettles” with its “swift and economical use of the word ‘dwindling,’ thriftily closing two stories at once, is Munro at her stunning best.”

  Like many other writer-reviewers, Moore also sees “Family Furnishings” as arguably “the finest story in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, and surely one of several here that are among the most powerful she has written.” So impressed is Moore by the story (“There is not a more moving piece by anyone that I can think of”) that she devotes over a third of her space to its analysis. “Family Furnishings” is, as Moore asserts, an “exploration of the spiritual escape and emotional cost of becoming a writer.” Like other reviewers who note this story, Moore is aware of Del Jordan and some other would-be writers elsewhere in Munro’s work; like them, too, she makes no mention of either “Material” or of “Dulse,” two earlier protracted analyses of the writer’s self-absorption. Quite rightly, Moore sees “Family Furnishings” “as an acknowledgement of [the literary life’s] emotional distances and thefts and its willing trade of the human for art. It is a song of relief alloyed with shame. Munro has beautifully registered the ambivalent conscience of the writer – not judgmentally but helplessly, as before love and the life story love brings before dying.”

  The intellectual magazines in the United States offered good reviews of Hateship, too. In Commonweal, Tom Deignan begins by noting that “National Book Award-winner Jonathan Franzen made a fascinating admission” to the New York Times Magazine, that after DeLillo, the living author he most admired was Ali
ce Munro. (This had been noticed as well by K. Gordon Neufeld when he reviewed Hateship in the Calgary Herald, and ever since Franzen reviewed Runaway in a famously enthusiastic way for the New York Times Book Review, it was recalled elsewhere too.) Contrasting DiLillo’s “sweeping intercontinental tomes with Munro’s exquisite portraits of confused Canadiana,” Deignan opts for Munro. “Take the endlessly plundered topic of gender,” he writes, “on which no author is quite as illuminating.” Citing “Family Furnishings,” he maintains that Munro’s “deft manipulation of past and present tense, of narrative voice, as well as her exploration of the writer’s role in society, put her postmodern credentials on display. But inevitably, the drama of love, mortality, and human entanglement trump such formal matters.” Deignan moves through the stories, noting in passing that Munro’s “stories sprawl, lacking a central focus. This is mostly a good thing, giving her stories a unique depth.” Ultimately, he concludes that “nobody ever has written stories quite like Alice Munro’s.”