Alice Munro

by Robert Thacker

  “Our Chekhov, Our Flaubert”: The New Yorker’s Munro Triptych, Runaway

  Munro’s vaunted ability to encapsulate whole lives in a single story – the by now clichéd view that each of her stories contains material sufficient for a novel – may have reached its apogee with the triptych of Juliet stories the New Yorker published in June 2004 as most of its summer fiction issue. Its three stories – “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence” – treat Juliet in the three phases of human life that are Munro hallmarks: as a young woman setting out, finding her own way in “Chance,” leaving Ontario for British Columbia; as an adult, a young mother though still very much a daughter, returned home to visit her aged parents, her mother dying, in “Soon”; in “Silence,” as the middle-aged mother of the adult Penelope who has elected to have no contact with her. That story ends with Juliet’s thoughts described: “She keeps on hoping for a word from Penelope, but not in any strenuous way. She hopes as people who know better hope for undeserved blessings, spontaneous remissions, things of that sort.” In her unceasing search for perfection – just the right cadence, the rhythm that captures the story’s and the triptych’s end moment and emotion – Munro has continued to edit: the New Yorker’s final sentence included a comma after “hopes” and “or” before the final phrase. Alice Munro, writing on.

  That Treisman and the other editors at the New Yorker were willing to commit so much of the fiction issue to Munro – some were almost giddy at the prospect as they planned it – says just what might be said as to how her work is valued there today. The triptych is over thirty thousand words, leaving room for just one other story. (They had showcased Munro before: the length of “The Love of a Good Woman” alone warrants such a designation, and the seventy-fifth anniversary issue – February 21 and 28, 2000 – contains just one other story, by Woody Allen, along with “Nettles.”) Still, the New Yorker had only once or twice run more than one story by a single author in the same issue before.

  McClelland & Stewart and Knopf, as had long been their practice, each printed its own edition of Runaway from the same Knopf setting, each with its own dust jacket. Munro and Gibson opted for another painting by Mary Pratt, this one an image of a four-poster bed with the top cover thrown back, with part of the cutline from Simpson’s review of Hateship (“the living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years”) included below the title. Munro and Close covered the Knopf edition with a drawing of stately blades of grass. McClelland & Stewart published on September 25, printing 40,000 initial copies as the book went to the stores. Knopf’s edition was published on November 14 with a first printing of 100,000.

  Faced with an eleventh book from a writer whose work has been praised for well over thirty years, a writer who was reaching her mid-seventies, reviewers of Runaway understandably took the long view of Munro’s career. In Canada, that view was especially long. Claire Messud, in the Globe and Mail, especially noted “Powers” and the Juliet triptych, and commented, “Both undertakings are extraordinary, the former as a departure for Munro, in its final entwining of Gothic personal histories and imaginings; the latter as an example of the author in full and glorious literary force.” Messud concluded with a correction to Ozick’s ubiquitous assertion that Munro is “our Chekhov,” writing that “but like the character Juliet, Munro does always choose to show compassion. Like life itself, she remains neutral. So she is our Flaubert, too.” Philip Marchand in the Toronto Star maintained that Munro’s “powers of verbal precision are undiminished,” that her “trademark techniques” of creating utterly precise settings and “note-perfect dialogue” are unwavering, but above all she knows that “to engage the heart of the reader, it is also necessary to show these characters in desperate circumstances.”

  Jane Urquhart, in the National Post, like Marchand, writes from long familiarity: “Munro never lets us walk away without knowing that some other narrative was possible, and she has always been a master at showing us how missed cues and misperceptions can alter the course of an entire life. And an entire life is what we get in each of these stories, the full canvas. One of the great mysteries of Alice Munro’s genius as a writer of short stories is just how she manages to cause her readers to feel closer to the characters she creates than they do to certain members of their own family.” Judith Timson, reviewing Runaway in Maclean’s, maintained that “in Alice Munro’s hands, the smallest moments contain the central truths of a lifetime, in which disaster, honesty and hope are teased out as if indeed there was not a minute to lose.” These stories, Bruce Erskine in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald asserted, “demonstrate how random, arbitrary and false life can be, and how little we truly know about what we experience.”

  In the United States, such ready familiarity with Munro’s work as that found in Canada was evident too. A. Alvarez, in the New York Review of Books, begins an extended review by focusing on the three characters in the title story, writing that they “are held tight together by a net of erotic tension.” Like many reviewers, Alvarez found “Passion” to be the volume’s singular story and used it to generalize about Munro’s women, who “assume from the start that love doesn’t last, marriages go sour, and people generally are unfaithful.… Her pessimism in these new stories is relentless.” That this review beat the Publishers Weekly notice for Runaway to press was an indication of Munro’s still-growing status. “One never knows quite where a Munro story will end,” the anonymous PW reviewer asserted, “only that it will leave an incandescent trail of psychological insight.”

  These reviews began a progress in the United States that is remarkable both for its range of publication and the unanimity of its verdict. From one end of the country to the other – the Hartford Courant to the Seattle Times – Runaway was seen as yet another offering from an accomplished, known, and well-appreciated author. The two reviews produced by the New York Times were at something of cross purposes, however: Michiko Kakutani, who has been reviewing Munro since Progress, wrote in “Books of the Times” that the triptych of Juliet stories offers “an affecting portrait [and] the harrowing trajectory of her life, but most of the entries in this volume are more stilted affairs.” Kakutani feels that unlike Munro’s previous work, these stories seemed forced, “relying on awkwardly withheld secrets and O’Henryesque twists to create narrative suspense.” Other reviewers, including Mary Hawthorne in the London Review of Books, also felt that some of these structural shifts failed to convince.

  At the New York Times Book Review, the editor apparently followed up on Jonathan Franzen’s admiring comment in the New York Times Magazine profile of Munro on October 24 and commissioned a four-page lead review of Runaway by Franzen. His review is singular in that it reviews Runaway without telling the reader anything about any of the stories in the book.

  Franzen began: “Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America, but outside of Canada, where her books are No. 1 best sellers, she has never had a large readership.” Franzen meant large by U.S. standards. Working against recent books that have had “large readerships” – Bill Clinton’s autobiography and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America – Franzen wrote that “I want to circle around Munro’s latest marvel of a book, Runaway, by taking some guesses at why her excellence so dismayingly exceeds her fame.” He then continued to offer eight guesses, most of which are utterly accurate (“Munro’s work is all about storytelling pleasure,” “Because, worse yet, Munro is a pure short-story writer”). Franzen considers the perennial question of short story writers versus novelists, asserting that beyond “the Great One herself” – Munro – “the most exciting fiction written in the last 25 years – the stuff I immediately mention if somebody asks me what’s terrific – has been short fiction.” He then offered a long list of names. He also conjectured that because reviewing fiction is harder than non-fiction, and stories harder than novels, Munro has got short shrift. Throughout, probably demonstrating that very point, he made no mention of any story in Runaway, preferr
ing to discuss “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” from Hateship as his example of Munro’s art. In writing this quirky and well-informed review, Franzen used the bully pulpit of the lead feature review in the New York Times Book Review to make just one crucial point: “Read Munro! Read Munro!” Franzen called this a “simple instruction.” It is, and in a singular way, it must have had some effect.

  Of the wide range of detailed notices Runaway received in the United States, Lorrie Moore’s in the Atlantic Monthly, “Leave Them and Love Them,” is among the most considered. Beginning with Munro’s perpetual concern with daughters, mothers, and families, Moore wrote:

  Great literature of the past two centuries has sentimentalized politics, crime, nature, and madness, but seldom the family, and the wrenching incompatibility of a woman’s professional or artistic expression with her familial commitments has made its way into the most undidactic of literary minds. It has appeared, to powerful and unexpected effect, in much of Munro’s work, especially her most recent collection, Runaway.

  Moore detailed just how Munro accomplishes this throughout, paying special attention to “Passion” and to the Juliet triptych, and continued, saying of these stories that

  they are constructions of calm perplexity, coolly observed human mysteries. One can feel the suspense, poolside, as well as any reader of The Da Vinci Code; one can cast a quick eye toward one’s nine-year-old son on the high dive and get back to the exact sentence where one left off. The thrilling unexpectedness of real life, which Munro rightly insists on, will in her hands keep a reader glued – even if that reader is torn by the very conflicts (work to do, kid on the high dive) dramatized therein.

  For Moore, Munro is a writer whose “writing never loses its juice, never goes brittle; it also never equivocates or blinks, but simply lets observations speak for themselves. In fiction real turmoil is made artificial turmoil, only to seem real again; this is literary realism’s wish, and one of Munro’s compelling accomplishments.” Toward the end of this thorough review, Moore noted the absence of “Hired Girl” and “Fathers” from this, or any collection, though they have each appeared in the New Yorker. “Maybe even more stories are lying in wait,” she hoped. “Someone writing at this level well into her seventies, outliving the female friends to whose memory the book is dedicated and who must have been part of its inspiration, is a literary inspiration herself.”

  Major daily newspapers and national magazines to one side, Runaway showed every sign of reaching into publications with different audiences. On Identity Theory – identitytheory.com, which calls itself “a literary Web site, sort of” – for example, Angie Kritenbrink wrote that she wanted to “thank Whoever Is Listening that Alice Munro never went through an MFA program; instead, she has been able to craft her very own unique voice, in postmodern literature. Instead of being self-consciously avant garde or, well, postmodern, Munro’s stories have an organic feel – the way stories feel when they are being told by real women, with stops and starts, bends and turns, and going back for explanations, focusing more on feelings and reactions than twists of plot. There have been many times I have been reading Munro stories waiting for a question to be answered, a plot point to be revealed, only to realize that she wasn’t going to do it, and anyway that wasn’t the point of the story at all.”

  Besides on Web publications, Runaway was reviewed in popular national publications in the United States. Lee Aitken in People writes that “Munro is wise in the ways of human emotion, and her stories are so rich in subplots, asides and ancillary characters that even a tale of less than 50 pages feels as rounded as a novel.” In the same vein, in USA Today Maria Fish wrote that Runaway “may very well be the synthesizing work of literature’s keenest investigators into the human soul. It will, in any case, reach far beyond its time.” Franzen wrote that “Oprah Winfrey will not touch short story collections,” but People and USA Today certainly deal with the same mass market as Oprah Winfrey.8

  Taking up the Chatto & Windus Runaway, editors in the United Kingdom clearly saw it as something of an inspiration too, since the book received extensive and detailed notice. In the Economist, the reviewer held that these “plots ring true but never feel trite. Ms. Munro’s prose is translucent, never intruding. Indeed, her whole approach is a humble one, focused on the stories themselves. It is easy to overlook how skilfully they are told.” In the Spectator, Sebastian Smee confessed that “it is difficult, I find, to go from reading Munro’s work to reading almost any other contemporary fiction (I tend to stick to non-fiction for a while). By comparison, other authors’ voices seem naïve, histrionic or absurdly style-conscious.” Smee calls Munro’s “almost melodramatic congestion of coincidence, tragedy and death” in the Juliet triptych especially, but throughout, “a kind of aesthetic brinkmanship.” He continued:

  Munro will stretch the credibility of her plot to breaking point; yet somehow, in pointing to the very real limits of empathy, she elicits a nod of hard-hearted recognition more powerful and seductive than even the most compassionate and all-encompassing prose.

  The key to it all is the quality that is easiest to pinpoint but hardest to achieve; Munro’s characters never breathe the thin, tangy air of melodrama. They move in the richer, more oxidised atmosphere of great fiction.

  Paul Bailey, in the Independent, asserted that the art of Alice Munro is rightly called “incomparable,” that Munro’s great gift “is to pull the rug out from beneath the reader’s feet at the very point when he or she feels secure. These reminders of the haphazard nature of human relationships are delivered to chilling effect, frequently in one well-placed sentence.” Bailey says further that this is “the moment when her pen becomes a scalpel, cutting away at the certainties that have sustained her characters.” Unlike other critics, though, Bailey found to his dismay that the third story in the Juliet triptych, “Silence,” falters – there Juliet “has outstayed her welcome. She is no longer interesting.” In the same vein, he found “Tricks” dissatisfying as well and in “Powers,” “potentially the most resonant story” in the collection, Munro “becomes diffuse, wayward and unsure of where she is going.”

  Writing in the Irish Times, Éilís Ní Dhubhne called Runaway a treasure and, although the book would probably not be the best book to begin reading Munro’s writing, “for those familiar with her work … the collection is a precious gem.” She is a writer who “has lived and written on, and changed. Yeats, I think, said that hard thinking was the basis of good art. Alice Munro is lyrical, painterly, comic, but she is a thinker. Her ideas mature with every book. This is a real cause for literary celebration.” In the Times of London, Tom Gatti wrote that Runaway is “an echo-chamber of a book” since, like Faulkner, “Munro is aware of the impossibility of ever truly ‘starting over’ ” despite her characters’ attempts to run away. “Millions of words have been spilt in attempts to tell us exactly what it means to be human. In eight short stories … Munro performs that very miracle.”

  Alan Hollinghurst, who reviewed Munro’s work in the 1970s and 1980s, brought that perspective to his review of Runaway in the Guardian. He likened the Juliet triptych to The Beggar Maid and commented on Munro’s ability to manipulate “gaps and jumps in time” by which she creates “the effect in each case of a life revealed, not a life explained, and certainly not a life explained away. [Munro] knows that life in the past was unhampered by any sense of its future quaintness, so she doesn’t explain. She gives us a past as unselfconscious as today.” Concluding, Hollinghurst focused on a passage from “Passion” – which he called “among the finest things she has ever done” – and wrote that “Munro has never made a fuss about sex, but a deep understanding of it is integral, in different ways, to each of these stories.”

  A similar extended and thoughtful treatment was offered by Mary Hawthorne in the London Review of Books. She began with an extended biographical overview of Munro and, before she took up Runaway, offered this reminiscence of her own:

  Years ago, I came ac
ross a note written by Munro in the margin of the last galley of “Oranges and Apples” (a story that ran in the New Yorker, where I was working), which documents the insane things that a character has done in his life in the hope of somehow crashing out of it. He does not know that he is doing these things, and does not ever manage to get out, because when it comes down to it he never really wants to. “I see this as a fairly normal state of mind,” her note read.

  Hawthorne paid special attention to the Juliet triptych, finding fault both with Juliet’s exchange with Don, the minister who visits her dying mother, and with the woman from the commune who gleefully informs Juliet that her daughter Penelope would not be contacting her. These scenes, Hawthorne wrote, “are so uncharacteristic of Munro as to make for almost painful reading.” Another such instance is the scene in which Eric’s body, found on a beach after he drowned in a storm, is ritualistically burned by those who knew him. Juliet, Hawthorne concluded, “is always less than candid, but perhaps that’s the point: like all of us, she’s stuck with who she is.”

  Other reviewers of Runaway in Great Britain offered assessments that ring true. Mary Blanche Ridge in the Tablet commented that “some of the stories are almost unbearable to read. But all are redeemed by the wonderful writing: by the humour (even when it is black) with which many of them are imbued, and most of all by Munro’s own vigorous belief in the resilience of the human spirit.” Citing the passage describing Robin’s anticipation of her yearly trip to Stratford to see a Shakespearian play in “Tricks,” Oliver Herford in the Times Literary Supplement described it as being about “the value of art within a life.” This, he wrote, “is the best and most lasting reason to read Alice Munro: she can accommodate the reader’s desire temporarily to inhabit the world of the fiction and to feel that there is room to turn around there.” In the Scottish Review of Books, Karl Miller began his review by asserting that “two of Scotland’s most gifted writers, of all time, are born-and-bred Canadians – Alice Munro and Alistair MacLeod, now in their seventies.” In a thorough review that takes up Munro’s Scots heritage – and details her connections to James Hogg while tracing Scottish material in various stories – Miller treats Runaway within the contexts of the whole of her work. He notes too that Munro’s “complete stories are the one long story of her life, the one work of art.”