Runaway [Hardcover]

Alice Munro (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 26, 2004

In Alice Munro’s superb new collection, we find stories about women of all ages and circumstances, their lives made palpable by the subtlety and empathy of this incomparable writer.

The runaway of the title story is a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband. In “Passion,” a country girl emerging into the larger world via a job in a resort hotel discovers in a single moment of stunning insight the limits and lies of that mysterious emotion. Three stories are about a woman named Juliet–in the first, she escapes from teaching at a girls’ school into a wild and irresistible love match; in the second she returns with her child to the home of her parents, whose life and marriage she finally begins to examine; and in the last, her child, caught, she mistakenly thinks, in the grip of a religious cult, vanishes into an unexplained and profound silence. In the final story, “Powers,” a young woman with the ability to read the future sets off a chain of events that involves her husband-to-be and a friend in a lifelong pursuit of what such a gift really means, and who really has it.

Throughout this compelling collection, Alice Munro’s understanding of the people about whom she writes makes them as vivid as our own neighbors. Here are the infinite betrayals and surprises of love–between men and women, between friends, between parents and children–that are the stuff of all our lives. It is Alice Munro’s special gift to make these stories as vivid and real as our own.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Alice Munro has been accused of telling the same story over and over, and to a certain extent the characterization is true. Her subject matter is inevitably the vagaries of love between middle-aged people in some rural Canadian setting, trapped there by the combination of their desires and weaknesses. Or, if not love, then at least the mysteries of relationships as characters struggle to understand each other and themselves. But this thematic single-mindedness can hardly be considered a criticism considering Munro tells stories better than anybody else and with a level of precision matched by few. It would be like criticizing Shakespeare for writing about politics.

Runaway is no exception. The stories take place throughout Canada--northern Ontario, the Prairies, the West Coast, Stratford--and feature women and men drifting in and out of each other's orbits, pulled by forces they don't understand. In "Runaway," a woman considers leaving her husband with the help of a neighbor, but the husband has other plans. In "Chance," a woman leaves her life behind in a quest for a man she met on a train crossing the country. Their intertwined lives play out through two more stories, "Soon" and "Silence," but the path they follow is as unpredictable to the reader as it is to them. In "Trespasses," a small town's women dream of escaping their lives only to find themselves in lives they never imagined.

What really marks the stories is Munro's sense of mood. There's a sense of hidden menace or even violence everywhere in Runaway. It occasionally erupts, but always in surprising and unexpected ways, and with unintended consequences. Munro may be an old-fashioned storyteller, but she understands chaos theory well enough. The same story? Sure. But it's a damn good one. --Peter Darbyshire, Amazon.ca

From Bookmarks Magazine

Often compared to Eudora Welty, Anton Chekhov, and James Joyce, Munro is a brilliant short story-writer. She mines the small towns of her native Ontario for inspiration, penning short stories (30-40 pages each) that possess the depth of novels. Runaway, her tenth collection, contains her trademark unconventional plots and lost characters. Critics agree that the suspense and drama lodged within the characters give each story its power. Like the best writers, Munro involves readers in her characters’ thoughts and actions, "coaxing trust out of our hands before we realize we had it to give away" (The Oregonian). The tiniest details relate to the largest themes—and most, involving women—are not happy. As the Seattle Times notes, Munro introduces "tougher and chillier than usual" moments than in previous collections, like 1994’s Open Secrets. But, even with a darker view of human nature, Munro "sings, and her women are heroic" (Boston Globe).

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; 1st edition (October 26, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 140004281X
• ISBN-13: 978-1400042814
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #309,054 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alice Munro grew up in Wingham, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario. She has published eleven previous books.During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the W.H. Smith Prize, the National Book Circle Critics Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the Lannan Literary Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and the Rea Award for the Short Story. In Canada, she has won the Governor General's Award, the Giller Prize, the Trillium Book Award, and the Libris Award.Alice Munro and her husband divide their time between Clinton, Ontario, and Comox, British Columbia.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

70 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful Stories, November 17, 2004

By 

Great Faulkner's Ghost (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Runaway (Hardcover)

If you have not read Alice Munro, how I envy you. You have so much pleasure ahead of you. She writes for all of us about wonder- the wonder of everyday life; the small things; the touching things; the things that make you say, yes, this is the human heart; all of these are her fictional world, much as they are our pasts, and our presents. This is a strong collection and an excellent place to get to know what she is about. After this, explore her backlist. My personal favorite besides this is an early collection called,The Moons of Jupiter, which is still in print in a nice paperbak format. I hope you enjoy discovering her as much as I have.

56 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Through the prism of time. . ., November 15, 2004

By 

J. Marren "jtm497" (Glen Ridge, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Runaway (Hardcover)

Alice Munro's newest collection of short stories is about time, how small events change lives, and how different those events look as time passes. Several of the stories span the lifetimes of the characters, focusing on one event that changes things forever.
Take "Chance," "Soon" and "Silence," a trio of stories about Juliet, a young woman whose choices about who to speak to on a train change her life forever. Munro masterfully picks three incidents, the train ride, a visit home, and a search for a daughter, and through them tells the story of Juliet's life. I found it sad to see how the great passion of the first story ends in an accident by the third. Or "Tricks," perhaps the most painful story in the collection. The story opens with Robin saying the most banal thing one could imagine, "I'll die if that dress isn't ready." Then we learn why, and when Munro repeats the line again we see it's fraught with meaning. We learn of a chance meeting that offers a promise that's snatched away a year later; only at the end of her life does Robin learn what really happened.
Suicides, lost souls and disappointments thread through these stories. Munro's world is a lost and lonely place, and be forewarned--none of these stories promises a happy ending. But they're beautifully written and struck a chord--don't we all recall brief, seemingly trivial moments years later and wonder what if?

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Munro's "Coincidental" Epiphanies, December 12, 2004

By 

Daniel A. Johnson (Chicago, IL (Humbolt Park)) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Runaway (Hardcover)

Alice Munro may well be the best short story writer working today, but what's strange is that at first it's a little hard to see why she's so good. She doesn't use any fancy-pants language, she doesn't worry about making her characters warm and sympathetic, and she doesn't try to reach at the typical sorts of short story epiphanies, the straining towards lyrical proclaiming and the conclusive moment of a personal vision's consolidation.

What she offers instead is a conversational tone that is quirky and fractured enough to rise above the blandness of a typical conversational style. For example, this is how she renders a crucial scene in one story where the protagonist has entered the house of a man she has a crush on. Note the parenthesis, the incongruous academic metaphor, and the sentence fragments: "Juliet hears the door of the truck close, she hears him speaking to the dog, and dread comes over her. She wants to hide somewhere (she says later, I could have crawled under the table, but of course she does not think of doing anything so ridiculous). It's like the moment at school before the winner of the prize is announced. Only worse, because she has no reasonable hope. And because there will never be another chance so momentous in her life."

Furthermore, her stories don't so much ask us to root for the characters so much as to examine them, to consider their mistakes and misperceptions. For example, Munro's stories often break out into reflective moments like this one: "While she was running away from him - now - Clarke still kept his place in her life. But when she was finished running away, when she just went on, what would she put in his place? What else - who else - could ever be so vivid a challenge?" Personally, I was rooting for her only insofar as she really did want to leave her husband, who's rather grouchy and mean and worth ditching. But Munro doesn't care about making her into an idealized romantic hero; she instead wants to depict something far more difficult to understand, which is why the character would stay with her husband.

Also, rather than being a steady climb towards a typical epiphany, her stories derive their structure from what might be called "the coincidental epiphany." What I mean by that term is that, over and over in her stories, there are moments of crucial importance that also happen to be utterly coincidental. These moments come as utter surprises and derive their incredible power from the way they occupy the climaxes of a story, the places where what's supposed to be the focus is the protagonist's action and the question of whether it succeeds or fails. Munro's "coincidental epiphanies" instead recontextualize the concerns that led to the protagonist's actions in the first place.

By way of illustration, I'll do a long quotation. The "trick" this passage refers to had accidentally ruined a love affair the protagonist was in; she is just now realizing that what seemed to be have been fate was really just the result of this random, accidental "trick":

"It was all spoiled in one day, in a couple of minutes, not by fits and starts, struggles, hopes and losses, in the long-drawn-out way that such things are more often spoiled. And if it's true that things are usually spoiled, isn't the quick way the easier way to bear?

But you don't really take that view, not for yourself. Robin doesn't. Even now she can yearn for her chance. She is not going to spare a moment's gratitude for the trick that has been played. But she'll come round to being grateful for the discovery of it. That, at least - the discovery which leaves everything whole, right up to the moment of frivolous intervention. Leaves you outraged, but warmed from a distance, clear of shame."

Throughout her stories, it's as if Munro is saying, "the crucial moments in life are often the coincidences, not the moments of decision and action that we think of as the real core of our lives. Stories should thus focus on these moments in order to understand and cope with them." In other words, Munro is a perfect guide to the farcical aspects of human life, the overlooked details and unexpected twists that change everything.