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| Alice Munro by Kim Stallknecht |
Alice Munro: AS Byatt, Anne Enright and Colm Tóibín hail the Nobel laureate
'Alice Munro is one of the greatest living writers, but she has always seemed to be almost a secret. Now everyone will know'
AS Byatt
This is the Nobel announcement that has made me happiest in the whole of my life. I remember reviewing Alice Munro in the Toronto Globe and Mail and saying she was as great as Chekhov, and the Canadians were surprised but happy. She has done more for the possibilities and the form of the short story than any other writer I know. You can never tell what she is going to say next – or what you the reader are going to feel next – from line to line. She appears to be in perfect control of her writing, but I interviewed her onstage once and she described how she writes enormously long versions of stories and then cuts them into shape. I admire this immensely. One of my favourite moments in her fiction comes in a story where a woman thinks of her day and then of her life as a series of things that have got to be done and are done: "not much to her credit to go through her life thinking, Well good, now that's over, that's over. What was she looking forward to, what bonus was she hoping to get, when this, and this, and this, was over?" One of her great gifts is recognising these peculiar – in some ways ludicrous – rhythms of mental life.
I belong to a distinguished club of passionate admirers of Munro. We all knew that she is one of the very greatest living writers, but she has always seemed to be almost a secret. Now everyone will know.
Anne Enright
It is tempting, on reading her stories, to think that Alice Munro is a modest writer and a likable one, but how do we know? She might be steely, fierce, ambitious as hell: she certainly, as five decades of short stories demonstate, knows how to stick to her guns. Besides, "modest" and "likable" are too pious and too small, as words go, to describe Munro's humane presence on the page. She is, as a writer, constantly, thoughtfully there; able to see her characters in all their faults, and to forgive those faults, or wonder at the possibility of forgiveness. Her narrators are like people you know. They are like you, actually – or a heightened, more perceptive version of you – the way they think about life, and realise things late, and carry on.
Short stories do not make any grandiose claims about truth and society. Munro's work has always posed a larger question about reputation itself; about how we break and remake the literary canon. That question was triumphantly answered by the Nobel prize. If her life's work proves anything, it is that the whole idea of "importance" means very little. Her stories do not ask for our praise, but for our attention. We feel, when we read them, less lonely than we were before.
Colm Tóibín
Alice Munro's genius is in the construction of the story. She has a way of suggesting, both in the cadences and the circumstances, that nothing much is going to happen, that her world is ordinary and her scope is small. And then in a story such as "Runaway", she manages to suggest a fierce loneliness, and begins to dramatise the most unusual motives and actions. Slowly, there is nothing ordinary at all. I would love to see her drafts, or the inside of her mind as she works, because my feeling is that this takes a great deal of erasing, adding, taking risks, pulling back, taking time. Her stories can be shocking and unnerving. I remember a few years ago arriving in Halifax and being told, as though it were hot news, that there was a new story by Munro in a magazine. A friend photocopied it for me and told me not to read it until I was in a comfort zone. This story was "Child's Play", which is forensic in its tone, at ease with cruelty and guilt, and tough, tough, but yet written using sentences of the most ordinary kind, and constructed with slow Chekhovian care.
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