As she begins her wending and ruminative review of Munro’s career and of Too Much Happiness in the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates comments that this thirteenth collection’s title is “both cuttingly ironic and passionately sincere.” Another reviewer, Karen R. Long, in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, compares Munro to some of her contemporaries also writing into their old age, maintaining that E.L. Doctorow’s “last novel led into bleakness, and Philip Roth … now flirts with fetishizing decay and death.” Munro, in contrast, “is still turning the seams inside out on her characters to unpredictable and pleasurable surprise.” Continuing that the book’s stories “take up home invasion, child murder (twice), and creepy perversion of the old-man/young schoolgirl variety,” Long notes the collection’s “jolting” qualities and writes of “the tabloid grubbiness of the lives in Too Much Happiness.” Munro is a writer who “can make the lurid sing with nuance and explicability, particularly in her opening story, ‘Dimensions,’ about a young chambermaid living quietly several years after the trauma of a triple homicide,” one that killed her children.
Just as Munro returned to the name “Willens,” which she had given to a character in one of her earliest published stories when she created the adulterous optometrist who is murdered in “The Love of a Good Woman,” with this opening story, “Dimensions,” harrowing and surprising, she echoes her younger self once again: “The Dimensions of a Shadow” was her first published story in Folio in 1950. That story, too, characteristically (and also obviously, in ways that reveal a young writer still very much grasping, even groping, toward her craft), moves toward a character’s innermost desires. Those desires – very much indicative of “the cruelty of the world” – are quite harsh, and suggest, as Menaker said, a view of “human behavior that is asocial, amoral, almost bestial but that will not be denied.” Munro, for her part, commented at the Toronto “Too Much Happiness!” event, when she was interviewed with Diana Athill, “I don’t understand the concept ‘ordinary people.’ ” To her, each of us is unique, often “touchable and mysterious” and also prone to frightening acts. Her stories unfurl, again and again, to reveal human beings being human. As so many reviewers and critics have written, and so many readers have paused to think: This is what it feels like to be, to be alive, to be a human being.
Her “family book” done and published, Munro returned with Too Much Happiness to another collection of stories of the sort that has been her hallmark since the 1980s. Most of its ten stories had been first published in the New Yorker in recent years – here there was some overlap, though, because of the historical and autobiographical cast of the previous book; two stories in Too Much Happiness, “Wenlock Edge” and “Dimensions,” appeared before Castle Rock. Three stories appeared first in Harper’s, confirming that the New Yorker editors had passed on them – the title story for reasons of length, certainly. As with every collection since The Love of a Good Woman, Munro includes a very long story that is also in some way surprising. In the case of “Too Much Happiness,” she offers another piece of historical fiction, but this one is focused on a real historical figure, a famous Russian mathematician named Sophia Kovalevsky. Almost as if she were sneering at those critics who have claimed that Munro focuses too exclusively on her own time, her own class, and her own place, here she offers a moving title story from the nineteenth century that never so much as mentions Canada, let alone Huron County, Ontario.
A final story remains to be noted: “Wood.” First published in the New Yorker in November 1980, it had awaited inclusion in a collection ever since, almost thirty years. Unlike the fugitive pieces Munro incorporated into Castle Rock, “Wood” had no autobiographical cast to it – she and her editorial triumvirate just never agreed that it fit into a collection, as new collections were assembled and published (indeed, Ann Close was not sure it would make this one, where it appears just before the long title story, the last in the book).17 The story of Roy Fowler, a sign painter whose overriding passion is different kinds of hardwood, the original 1980 version – for which Munro gleaned considerable information from Gerry Fremlin – originally focused on a serious accident that Fowler had in the woods as he felled a tree, and how he saved himself. Now, almost thirty years later and doubtless having thought about what the story needed many, many times since, Munro the perpetual reviser has expanded Roy’s relationship with his wife, developed her character, extended the accident and the action, and so transformed it into a much deeper, much richer, and ultimately much more satisfying story of both surprise and redemption. Munro has, as always, continued to think the story through, to probe its heart, to catch its essential beat. Looking at the first version of “Wood” and at its transformation into the much better version found in Too Much Happiness, a reader sees Munro’s transforming vision in microcosm. As Oates writes, the story “comes to a plausibly happy ending, where the reader has been primed to expect something quite different, as in one of Jack London’s gleefully grim little allegories of men succumbing to the wild.”
The reviews of Too Much Happiness, already mentioned briefly, do have something of a valedictory air to them. But now there is a continuing meditation on just how Munro does what she does. Leah Hager Cohen, in yet another cover review in The New York Times Book Review, begins wondering if the Germans “have a term for it. Dopplegedanken, perhaps: the sensation, when reading, that your own mind is giving birth to the words as they appear on the page. Such is the ego that in these rare instances you wonder, ‘How could the author have known what I was thinking?’ Of course, what has happened isn’t this at all, though it’s no less astonishing. Rather, you’ve been drawn so deftly into another world that you’re breathing with someone else’s rhythms, seeing someone else’s visions as your own.” Thus Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness. Cohen continues to talk of this story or that, expressing amazed reaction to what Munro accomplishes. (“The real story keeps turning out to be larger than, and at a canted angle to, what we thought it would be. The effect is initially destabilizing, then unexpectedly affirming.”) Taking on the perennial and by now quite clichéd Ozick exclamation of Munro as “our Chekhov,” Cohen concludes: “And at this point in Munro’s career, how much can [such comparisons] add? What is certain is this: She is our Munro. And how fortunate we are to call her that.”
Although less concerned with Munro’s effects than Cohen is, Anne Enright considers Munro’s presence as a model, and in the Globe and Mail asserts that “The most salutary thing, for her fellow writers, is the way that Munro, buffeted by our adulation, has carried on doing exactly what she has always done, with scarcely a wobble on the high wire. Of course, she might deny that there is a wire, she might say that she is just walking on the ground. But it is a mistake to say that writers do not know what they are doing; in my experience, they know very well.”
As the entire trajectory of Munro’s career has shown, and as has been detailed here, Enright’s discerning assertion applies utterly to Alice Munro. W.P. Kinsella, who himself stopped writing fiction in his sixties, marvels at this in a review titled “Everything is Funny” (a remark that Munro once made to him when he noticed for the first time that one of her stories was funny – even, one adds, ironic titles like “Too Much Happiness”). Reading this collection, he sees Munro still writing at the highest level: these stories are “as good as anything she written in her long career.… The language is always crisp and clear, like the tinkling of bells. Reading becomes a compulsion: one has to find out what is going to happen.”
Surveying the reviews of Too Much Happiness, one finds apt phrasings, sharp insights, and evidence of great care in reading wherever one looks. Philip Marchand, who in 2007 published an essay entitled “The Problem with Alice Munro” where he bewails the sameness of Munro’s vision, takes up Too Much Happiness in the spirit of something of a deathbed conversion; he begins his review in the National Post by asserting that “If Alice Munro had never existed, part of the soul of Canada would have remained inarticulate, forgot
ten, submerged.… It has always been Munro’s aesthetic to ‘tell stories to make your hair curl.’ ”18 Christopher Taylor, writing in the Guardian, offers this clear summation: “Rural or puritanical suspicions of pretension, which often oppress her characters, have left their impress on her writing style, too. Her prose is clean, precise and unmannered; her stories are attentive to emotion but almost witheringly unsentimental. She is also a storyteller rather than a maker of atmospheric vignettes, not afraid to shift chronology around or have dramatic things happen.” Like many readers, Taylor pays especial attention to “Fiction,” one of the volume’s very best, along with the title story. After describing it, he writes: “Laid out in a short summary, the story’s workings – the lessons and counter-lessons in fiction making; the fluent, dramatic changes of perspective; the approach to, and retreat from, generalising wisdom – inevitably seem a bit squashed. On the page, though, they hang together beautifully, without strain; and the same holds true for many of the other pieces in the book.” Munro’s stories, just as Cohen mused, “create a powerful illusion of bringing their readers up against unmediated life.…”
Michael Gorra, in perhaps the best single review of Too Much Happiness to be found, writes in the Times Literary Supplement of Munro’s effects at length and with what seems stunning insight. Looking back to Castle Rock, he acknowledges the notion of it being her last book but maintains that “with time [it] will stand as something like her Enigma of Arrival.” By this he means that the book will be seen as a critical text for Munro, capturing her own explanations and wonderings over her ancestry. More than that, her work’s singularity “lies in the fact that it has never seemed to be about her” – by this he seems to mean not that it is without autobiographical material, but rather that she has been able to rise beyond the descriptive to the universal, since “this collection does show the blend of continuity and change that one wants and hopes to find in a late book by a master.” Focusing closely on “Some Women” (Munro’s story that begins, “I’m amazed sometimes to think how old I am” before it tells a story from the narrator’s teenaged girlhood), Gorra asks, “What did the narrator learn that summer that has to do with the fact of her own old age? What prompts her memory? It’s too easy to say that its last words [“I grew up, and old”] make the narrator herself into the subject of the tale, and these questions must remain unanswered. The fact that we ask them is, however, one mark of Munro’s power. We ask, and trust the narrator precisely because she gives no answers; trust that she herself knows, even if she can’t or won’t tell us.”
Gorra then argues that “Many great poets have lived and worked to a fine age; few fiction writers have.… Unlike Philip Roth [Munro] does not seem to rage at the indignity of years, and yet if I had to reduce the concerns of Too Much Happiness to a single word, it would be ‘mortality.’ ”
Moving through “Dimensions,” Gorra spends considerable attention on “Free Radicals” – its “conclusion is even terser than that of ‘Some Women,’ a two-word paragraph which feels like no ending at all: ‘Never know.’ It leaves Nita physically safe but with her situation unresolved; only death will do that. Munro has always had an ability to take a narrative corner at speed, to whip a story into a new direction at the last minute. But the corners are now tighter than ever, single words or sentences that seem marked by an epigrammatic impatience with the whole business of endings; as though every tale might allow for an alternative version and no story is ever really over.”
Presumably, Gorra has not studied the proof materials in the New Yorker files, or even Munro’s proof pages for Too Much Happiness at the Alice Munro Fonds at the University of Calgary. There, not at all surprisingly, anyone can see Munro working on her endings – perpetually, as she always has, sometimes in concert with an editor, sometimes in defiance of an editor screaming for final delivery of a perfectly fine existing ending, sometimes alone: the endings of her stories always matter, they get the most attention, the most frequent changes. Gorra is right about Munro’s writing. Continuing to wonder over Nita in “Free Radicals,” Gorra writes tellingly about Munro’s ongoing effects on her readers, saying that “the drama of her situation will remain in my head long after I have forgotten the story’s precise ending. I will remember its emotional terrain as I remember lines and fragments from this Yeats poem or that; a twist of the voice, an intonation separate, perhaps, from any actual words. Each of these is like a chip off some massy substance, a piece that implies the whole. Every one of them seems reinforced by the echoes of another, and to read Munro now, to visit and revisit this house or that marriage, seems like immersing oneself in a great poet’s collected works, a chance to inhabit a mind, a sensibility, that is larger than any of its individual iterations.” This fine review concludes by suggesting that Chekhov is not the Russian that Munro should be compared to – rather, “Turgenev is a different matter.” Wryly too, Gorra notes that Munro’s work “has been translated into thirteen languages. That’s not enough; but one of them is Swedish.”
In August 2009, just as Too Much Happiness was being published, Alice Munro announced that she was withdrawing it from the Giller Prize competition – one of her private reasons was that a head-to-head competition was shaping up between her and her good friend Margaret Atwood and, not surprisingly, Munro decided not to let it happen. Equally important to her, having won the Giller Prize twice already, her absence would clear the field for younger writers. At this, the Globe and Mail published a head-shaking editorial called “Too Much Generosity.” Such comments remind us of a point made by W.P. Kinsella in his review: describing what he calls “the CanLit scene,” Kinsella sees it as “an industry rife with jealousies, feuds and petty backbiting” yet announces categorically, “I have never heard anyone say anything unkind about Alice Munro, personally or professionally. When Alice wins a prize other writers and critics are not lined up to name ten books that should have won.” To Gibson’s relief (he knew how her Giller Prize withdrawal would cut her sales) Munro forgot to withdraw her book from the Governor General’s Award competition – Too Much Happiness was shortlisted but it did not win. Having just published another story, “Axis,” in the New Yorker, Munro now has two more awaiting publication at Harper’s. Its literary editor, Ben Metcalf, is delighted to have a story from her whenever he is able to get one. One of the two he has, “Train,” seems to have returned to material Munro worked on in the 1960s. She has a contract for another book of stories with Knopf, and the issue of the New Yorker including “Axis” announced that collection for the fall of 2012. She continues to write into her ninth decade, for she turns eighty next July.
Seen by Gorra as akin to Yeats – a comparison that pleases her – compared perpetually to Chekhov, Alice Munro continues to do “exactly what she has always done,” as Anne Enright said.19 She continues to write her lives – the life she has lived, the lives she has read about, researched, and studied; the lives she has imagined. Like her much-admired William Maxwell, Munro has demonstrated time and time again that she knows exactly how it should be done. Ever revising, ever hoping to do it better, she remains her readers’ Alice Munro, writing on.…
EPILOGUE
Alice Munro
Writing Her Lives, Writing Home, Writing On …
I worry the story.
–AM to Peter Gzowski, October 22, 1982
Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.
– “Face” (2009)
Just before Richard Avedon’s gallery of the magazine’s best-known authors and Munro’s “The Albanian Virgin,” the New Yorker’s 1994 fiction celebration ran an essay by Roger Angell, “Storyville.” A fiction editor and writer at the magazine since the mid-1950s, Angell took a long view of the New Yorker’s record as a venue for short fiction, trying to define the qualities needed to make it into its pages. He saw Munro in the line of the magazine’s mainstays: “Now and then, a w
riter stakes out an entire region of the imagination and of the countryside – one thinks of Cheever, Salinger, Donald Barthelme, and Raymond Carver, and now Alice Munro and William Trevor – which becomes theirs alone, marked in our minds by unique inhabitants and terrain. Writers at this level seem to breathe the thin, high air of fiction without effort, and we readers, visiting on excursion, feel a different thrumming in our chests as we look about at a clearer, more acute world than the one we have briefly departed.” Reading Munro, he continued, “brings back for me, every time, the mood of thrilling expectancy with which I read the entrancing events in all those variously tinted fairy-story collections of my childhood – ‘The Blue Fairy Book,’ ‘The Yellow Fairy Book,’ ‘The Grey Fairy Book,’ and the rest.” When he came to read “Silence” in manuscript, Angell remarked to his colleagues that “these lives seem thick with detail and events and other people, in a way that only Munro seems able to get down, and sad with the sadness of life.”
In the magazine’s 2004 triptych, Juliet’s life is “thick” with the precise details that Munro has spent her entire life observing, living, imagining, and shaping herself. Riding across Canada by train toward British Columbia and a new life in “Chance,” Juliet recalls Munro’s own such trips – in emotion, most probably, Juliet’s expectations of a new life are rooted in Munro’s own journey west with her new husband in December 1951, leaving Ontario. “Soon” draws upon another trip, that one back home to Ontario in 1954 with her new daughter, Sheila, and also meditates on the Chagall print she has been long drawn to, I and the Village. That story too, in Sara’s unacknowledged reassurance – “Soon I’ll see Juliet” – reveals Munro writing her lives whole. As she makes clear in “Soon” and emphatic in “Silence,” Juliet’s eager self-assured youthful certainty over her own life, and the ways of being she thinks superior to Sara’s hopeful though empty delusions, will ultimately founder against the rock of Penelope’s silence. “Sad with the sadness of life,” Alice Munro writes Juliet’s life through Sara’s: “Soon I’ll see Juliet” is a hopeful sign which resonates throughout the triptych. Juliet becomes a creature bereft, like her mother before her whom she was then able to dismiss, and not even answer with a reassuring “Yes”; in Penelope’s silence she becomes the worse, the one even more bereft. “Sad with the sadness of life,” Munro encapsulates the daughter’s vision felt and understood concurrent with the mother’s – each both remembered and, as one generation gives way to the next, lived.
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