The Sense of an Ending
‘Dear Life,’ Stories by Alice Munro
Charles McGrath
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Noviember 16, 2012
That Alice Munro, now 81, is one of the great short story writers not just of our time but of any time ought to go without saying by now. This new volume — her 14th, not counting a collection of selected stories that came out in 1996 — is further proof of her mastery, and also a reminder that unlike a lot of accomplished short story writers — unlike William Trevor, say, her only living rival — Munro did not hit a characteristic note early on and then stick with it. Over the years her work has deepened and enlarged. At the end of “Dear Life” is a suite of four stories that Munro says are “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact,” and she adds: “I believe they are the first and last — and the closest — things I have to say about my own life.” They seem to me as good as anything she has ever done, but also to strike out in the direction of a new, late style — one that is not so much a departure as a compressing or summing up of her whole career.Munro has never been an autobiographical writer in the strictest sense — not the way Updike was, for example — and yet certain themes and patterns in the stories more or less parallel the trajectory of her own life: a dreamy, misunderstood girlhood in hardscrabble western Ontario; an early marriage and move to Vancouver; children, separation, divorce; the death of parents; a return to that Lake Huron landscape, now inevitably altered; the contents and discontents of middle age. These four new stories all take place during the narrator’s childhood, and some of the material and the atmosphere will be familiar to readers of Munro’s earlier ones, especially those in “The Beggar Maid”: the ailing, hard-to-please mother; the remote, angry father; the childhood beatings; the mink farm that goes bust.
The style of those early stories was often bold, dramatic, a little raw. I edited many of them for The New Yorker, one of the first American publications to pay any attention to Munro, sometimes in spite of the hesitancy of William Shawn, who found them “rough” — violent, that is — and objected to the vulgarity of some of the language. (Years later I introduced Munro, who in person is shy and proper and as understated as most of her writing, to Shawn, and he said to me afterward, “She wasn’t at all what I expected.”)
But there is nothing in “Dear Life” that would give Mr. Shawn pause. As is so often the case now in Munro’s fiction, the drama sneaks up and then slips past almost before you’re aware of it. The descriptions are, even by Munro standards, precise and economical, and the mood is less angry or sorrowful than merely accepting. The very beautiful title story, for example, is ostensibly a reminiscence about living on a farm at the edge of town — neither truly rural nor really citified — and about the efforts of the narrator’s somewhat grandiose mother to keep up standards. It finishes with an anecdote about a misunderstanding — about a day when the mother, fearing that a neighbor was coming to snatch or attack her child, hid inside the house — and only then do you realize that it’s really a story about childhood intolerance, our need to misunderstand our parents so that we can be embarrassed by them, and about filial guilt. At the end, the narrator remarks almost matter-of-factly that years later, living in Vancouver, she did not go home for her mother’s last illness or even her funeral, and she ends the story this way: “We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do — we do it all the time.” The deeper theme here, as so often in Munro’s work, is memory itself and its selectivity and unreliability, its falseness even. As one character observes, no lies are “as strong as the lies we tell ourselves and then unfortunately have to keep telling.”
Another great Munro theme, sex or romantic longing — its unpredictability and the price it too exacts — is present only implicitly in these last four stories. In two of them, oddly, a prostitute appears and becomes an alluring, mysterious figure to the narrator’s younger self, bearing a hint of illicit thrill. But elsewhere in the volume a woman who is only half-knowingly on the way to dissolving her marriage astonishes herself by having a one-nighter with a younger man on a cross-Canada train, temporarily abandoning her young daughter; another mother flees her strait-laced marriage to take up with a dope-smoking hippie and is stoned or making love with him when her daughter drowns; a father throws himself under a train after lusting for his naked daughter; a crippled single woman allows herself to be blackmailed in order to continue a long-running affair; and a young teacher falls in love, as if on command, with an older doctor, is jilted by him and never gets over it.
Many of these stories are told in Munro’s now familiar and much remarked on style, in which chronology is upended and the narrative is apt to begin at the end and end in the middle. She has said that she personally prefers to read stories that way, dipping in at random instead of following along sequentially, and this structure also echoes her view of the world, in which events seldom follow a plotline but merely happen, suddenly and inexplicably. Love especially: it strikes like a thunderclap in Munro’s fiction and often as ominously. In one of her earlier stories a character reflects that “love is not kind or honest and does not contribute to happiness in any reliable way.” And in a story in the new collection an elderly man, seemingly long past romance yet smitten again by an old girlfriend, tries to explain the nature of the attraction to his angry wife: “You know, it’s not even the person. It’s like a sort of aura. It’s a spell. . . . Do you understand? It just strikes like an eclipse or something.”
Munro is among the least fanciful of short story writers, seldom resorting to an image or a metaphor. This may reflect a lifelong habit of Canadian understatement — a suspicion of cleverness and a resistance to making too much of things — but it also accords with a sense in her fiction that the world is strange enough, without need of embellishment. In one of those last autobiographical stories, Munro makes a joke at her own expense. After describing in some detail a woman wearing a showy, too-tight dress, she remarks, “I think that if I was writing fiction instead of remembering something that happened, I would never have given her that dress. A kind of advertisement she didn’t need.” In fact, Munro’s fiction is full of details that initially seem distracting or extraneous, because life is like that, and especially life as we recall it.
The stories in this volume are filled with incidents, subplots, even characters that at first glance don’t fit the requirements of a classic, well-made short story — like those of Chekhov, to whom Munro is always being compared — and they’re why the narratives often take such surprising directions. In “Amundsen,” the story about the schoolteacher and the doctor, there’s a character both the principals wish weren’t there: a schoolgirl named Mary, clever, needy, a bit of a wiseass, who turns up at inopportune moments. At one point she interrupts a romantic dinner by appearing in costume and insisting on performing a number from “H. M. S. Pinafore.” She won’t be shut up or brushed away because she’s too full of life — or dear life, as the book’s title would have it: precious but also costly and so unpredictable it’s all one can do to hang on.
Charles McGrath, formerly the editor of the Book Review, is a writer at large for The Times.
No comments:
Post a Comment