Why would I impulsively urge teenagers to resist [other books]and read Alice Munro? Because, I suspect, they'd be lucky to be set anything that good in post-modern high school.
Munro plunged early into her first marriage and child bearing. There was more to her than the "reproductive daze, swamped by maternal juices", to borrow her sarcasm. She was not drowning, but saving ammunition. She published her first book at 37 and is still there at 70.
Language, sex, love, marriage, fate and death - Munro knows all their rhymes. The title for her 11th book comes from an imagined girls' game, along the lines of he loves me-he loves me not.
The leading situations of the stories appear simple, repetitive even.
Johanna, a stolid home-help, is lured onto the cross-Canada train by faked courtship letters. A widow has to settle affairs after her husband's planned suicide. Suffering cancer, a wife savours a single kiss with a cocky youth. One aspiring writer discovers new slants on sin and death, and another rediscovers a now-married childhood sweetheart.
While one young mother realises the smallness of her married life, another discerns the subtle point of a one-day affair. An older woman puzzles over the fate of Queenie, her lost stepsister.
Routinely, Munro stories take 30-40 pages to get from A to B and back through A again. She is a competitive writer in the best sense, almost preferring death to a failure to engage. She is determined to create some reverberations that the dutiful reader cannot help but absorb.
In Munro, I will accommodate habits that are annoying in lesser writers. I don't mind hearing one more time how she found her vocation. No matter if a single story wants to wander wilfully over three generations. Not a problem if the final paragraph charts the future life course of a principal character.
The disposition of restraint that greatly enhances the stories is the author's crystalline, yet charitable, view of human nature. The time-honoured technique that brings her view to life is an unerring ability to recreate regional speech and manners.
Laid out before Munro's eye, a crudely aspiring Southern Ontario dinner table presents fine gradations of behaviour that would do an oriental court proud. "There had to be far too much food, and most of the conversation had to do with the food," recalls her first aspiring writer. "There was a feeling that conversation that passed beyond certain understood limits might be a disruption, a showing-off. My mother's understanding of the limits was not reliable, and she sometimes could not wait out the pauses or honor the aversion to follow-up."
Reduced to an "information machine", Johanna's station agent decides that she lacks country manners, indeed has no manners at all. Not for his eyes are the nuances at Milady's, where Johanna blurts out her marriage plans while choosing a travelling dress. This is how Munro closes off the scene: "She must have felt she owed this person something - that they'd been through the disaster of the green suit and the discovery of the brown dress together and that was a bond. Which was nonsense. The woman was in the business of selling clothes, and she'd succeeded in doing just that."
Stripping the characters of their clothes if not pretences, Munro has always been an incisive reporter of sexual love. Not for her the slightly pornographic thrum of a Vladimir Nabokov, or the sexual tristesse of a Raymond Carver. She is closer to a Frederick Barthelme in directly accessing the torpid shame, dangerous electricity or dizzy elation of sex.
Munro's second aspiring writer no longer believes that "the high enthusiasm of sex fused people's best selves". Still, she aches to seduce the chaste companion of her childhood. The next day, somewhat returned to her senses, she is given this beautiful line: "Lust that had given me shooting pains in the night was all chastened and trimmed back into a tidy pilot flame, attentive, wifely."
Through their sexual encounters, or other peak revelations, the characters may glimpse an intersection between what fate deals us, and what we can do about it. They might hear the precise few words on which a present life turns, or feel an intimation of an alternate life unturned. This one could have been a husband. That one is a weak love, which will fade. The other one, a strong love, is not usable in the circumstances.
And, as ever, there are the tart aphorisms. "After their short, happy marriage," Munro deadpans, "they were sent to separate cemeteries to lie beside their first, more troublesome, partners."
It would take a special kind of honey to clear this mordant line from the back of the throat.
The title piece (Johanna's story) and one or two others compete for best of the litter. Comparing this collection with Open Secrets (1994), or The Progress of Love (1986), Munro seems to be holding her form.
This writer is the antithesis of the tortured artist. Faithful to what she knows, averaging one book every three years, she seems to have achieved much of what was originally within her reach.
(From the Canberra Times,23 March 2002)
