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Runaway: Stories (Audio Editions)

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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.

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?

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.

Alice Munro is a wonder and she has done it again with her latest book of short stories. The stories average about 35 pages in length on average but I finished each one feeling I had read and been captured and engrossed in an entire book. And in many cases, emotionally drained by the experience.

She writes about ordinary women at different times in their lives; not a great deal seems to happen, yet a great deal does happen. You are left feeling breathless at the arbitrariness of life, of fate and of chance. In other words, about life. It is so difficult to categorize her writing. She writes of women who are not worldly, not necessarily successful but she imbues her characters with the patina of "every woman".

Read and enjoy!

I have been learning to knit lately, and I'm still at the stage where each stitch is awkward and laborious. Watching my friend and teacher do it is quite different --- smooth and rhythmic, neither too much tension nor too little. I see that knitting is a mysterious architecture of wool and soul in which every loop and turn depends on every other, and with a single missed link the whole web can collapse.

Reading the Canadian writer Alice Munro is similar to this. Her stories are woven with such craft that it seems almost as if she is describing something that really happened rather than inventing it. And the consequences of a lucky encounter or a fateful decision are still playing out years later.

I must admit that I was intimidated by the prospect of reviewing Munro's latest collection, RUNAWAY, named one of the 10 Best Books of 2004 by the New York Times. She is probably my favorite living writer, and so unpretentious about what she does that the last thing I want is to describe her fiction in words fancier or more self-conscious (in one review, I found adumbrate, transformative, sustenance, and salvation) than the language she uses herself.

I'm not alone in feeling perplexed. Jonathan Franzen, writing in the New York Times Book Review (November 14, 2004), was so reluctant to do an ordinary review of this extraordinary writer that instead he produced a (brilliant) list of "guesses at why [Munro's] excellence so dismayingly exceeds her fame." And it's true: She is revered rather than celebrated --- no Pulitzer, no Nobel, not even a National Book Award (though she has won plenty of other prizes). Possibly (Franzen mentions this) it has to do with literary form: Short stories (Munro has written only one novel) have not been --- since the days of Chekhov (with whom she is regularly compared) and Saki, Katherine Mansfield and O'Henry --- as valued as much as novels. They're just not considered Big-Deal Lit.

But I am procrastinating. Without giving away the often devastating twists and surprises of the plots of these eight stories (if literary fiction isn't supposed to be suspenseful, somebody forgot to tell Munro), this is what I'd say to somebody who has never read her (if you have, you probably already have your own copy of RUNAWAY).

The first thing is the characters: I wouldn't say they are memorable in the sense that Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina are, but unlike either of those fictional ladies, they are endearingly ordinary: They don't swan around being melodramatic or heroic or incurably romantic. They are often smart, ardent girls, different from others at school, hungry for books and adventure and mystery --- like Grace in "Passion," one of my favorites in the collection. Here, Munro has crystallized the stuff of many a coming-of-age novel --- the innocence and fakery, the fear and the splendor --- into one powerful memory of a seductive family and a reckless ride. This is Munro's gift: She gathers us in with ordinary details, and a whole world opens up.

The second thing is the place: not just Canada, but a patch of western Ontario. Munro roots almost all her stories in this area a few hours from Toronto, where she grew up and now lives. "I am intoxicated by this particular landscape," she has said, and she seeds it with city people transplanted to the country (like Carla and her husband with their horse farm in the title story, "Runaway") or country people learning urban ways. There is always a tension between these two, and between other recurrent oppositions as well --- marriage and solitude, survival and suicide, faith and apostasy. Duality runs through her work like a bright thread.

The third thing that is so compelling about RUNAWAY is a powerful sense of fate, chance, destiny --- the exact word is unimportant. Frequently the structure of the stories works in a circle; you can't understand the beginning of "Trespasses" until you have read the end. Or, as in the case of the trio of interlinked stories about a woman named Juliet, you don't understand the implications of an accidental meeting in "Chance" and a fairly uneventful visit to aging parents in "Soon" until you read the third story, "Silence." These tales aren't just chronologically and thematically connected; what Munro does is more like planting time bombs in the narrative that will explode later on, when you least expect them.

This quality is even stronger in "Tricks." Robin, a nurse who lives near Stratford, Ontario, goes to see a Shakespeare play (until then, her only passion) and encounters --- yes, by accident --- Danilo, a man from Montenegro. They agree that they will meet again a year later. What happens then is a life --- and we follow Robin until she is in her sixties --- that has the arc and heartbreak and curious detachment of genuine tragedy. "Tricks" is so bold, so horrifying and at the same time so satisfying that I lived with it for days afterward.

Even though these stories are often piercingly sad, they aren't depressing. There is a wonderful strength and survivorship in the girls and women of RUNAWAY. In "Chance" Munro writes of Juliet's love of Greek (her degree is in Classics) as her "bright treasure"; in "Tricks," similarly, of Robin's anticipation of her next meeting with Danilo: "She was aware of a shine on herself, on her body, on her voice and all her doings." And in "Passion" Grace is told by her fiancé's mother, "Women always have got something, haven't they, to keep them going? That men haven't got."

RUNAWAY feels intimate and universal at the same time --- as if the author is whispering in your ear and seeing into your heart and laying bare your secrets. Perhaps that's because Munro herself has spoken of the extreme vulnerability of the "thinly clothed" writer who has only "the thing you're working on now." Her stories dig under the fences of writer and reader, and it is both disturbing and glorious.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman

Several years ago, I picked up Alice Munro's collection of short stories, Open Secrets, and started reading the first story, "Carried Away." Over fifty pages, I experienced half a century of a woman's life and a country's history written with boldness, sweep and utter command. By the time I finished the story, Munro had completely redefined my notions about what a short story could be.

Munro's best work continues to astonish, and a lot of it is on display in her latest collection, Runaway. The title story is classic Munro, which is as good as it gets. The runaway is a young woman attempting to flee a stalled marriage, and, ultimately, figure out where she fits in the world. The ending, which ties the fate of the girl's pet goat, also a runaway, with her own, is stunning in its rightness and emotional impact.

"Passion" is almost as good. A teenaged girl, Grace, takes an impulsive car ride and learns some life-altering truths about herself and about the dark currents of despair surging beneath the placid surface of her small town Canadian life. "Trespasses" is about a younger girl carried unwillingly on the tide of adult deceptions and desires. "Tricks" hinges on a moment of mistaken identity that changes the direction of a young nurse's life.

The least successful part of the collection is a group of three connected stories about Juliet, a callow classics major who cuts off ties to her past, only to have her daughter do the same thing to her many years later. The three stories have the length of a novella, but not the cohesiveness. Nor do any the individual panels in this triptych have the resonance of Munro's best made stories.

The story whose impact lingers longest is "Powers" which is too big in all ways to try and summarize. Read it, and be moved by writing that seems beyond storytelling, that feels like Truth Itself. Reading Munro at the height of her art is like listening to John Coltrane play the saxophone - there's a point where analysis breaks down and all you can do is pay homage to genius.

Munro characters all bump up against the same defining question: do you have the courage to be who you truly are? Her stories tend to be about small moments with big implications: those times in a life when possibilities for personal liberation either open up or close down. Since the desire to break free from what constrains us exists within all humans, the concerns of Munro's provincial Canadian girls, though firmly grounded in a time and place, are universal in their implications. These characters affect us so deeply because their successes and failures mirror our own.

Only great artists achieve this kind of universality, and that level of artistry is on display in Runaways. The collection doesn't have the sustained brilliance of Open Secrets, but what does? You can only compare Munro to herself, because, in the realm of the short story, she has no peers.

As many reviewers have noted, Runaway resonates in the mind of the reader with a force that is usually attributed to the concussive thump of a powerful novel. I would agree, it is as though we are getting eight compressed novels in Runaway... six, to be precise, since three of the stories are sequentially connected to each other.

So wonderful is her characterization and style that I would have remained interested, if any story had been expanded to be the length of a novel.

Having only read one other Munro collection (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage), I am no expert on her work. However, I would say that I enjoyed this book more than the other, simply because these stories seem to me to have a better resolve about them. They close, but they are not closed. Fine-tuned, their open-ended endings beg to be reflected upon. Runaway was an excellent source of near-endless discussion in my own elite Book Club of Two.

I highly recommend this book to any and all. I was thrilled to happen to have my TV on one evening, to see the elegant Alice rise and accept the Giller Prize, for Runaway. I joined in the applause, and startled the cat.

The stories are centered around the lives and experiences of women, that is to say, women are the protagonists of each story. As a male reader, I must say I thoroughly enjoyed the themes, the motifs, the relevance and style of each story, and conclude that Munro is not a writer only FOR women. Men who enjoy the very best that writing has to offer us today, should read her.

I think my own favorite story was Tricks. The twist of fate, the "trick" in this story alone, is worth the acquisition of and reading of this book.

Runaway is unforgettably good, and makes me want to go on and explore all things Munrovian. The wonderland of Alice Munro.

I have to admit I was a bit worried that these eight short stories about women may be too oriented toward the female perspective for me to appreciate fully. I am happy to report I was quite mistaken, as author Alice Munro is a gifted writer whose multi-layered writing style can be enjoyed by anyone. And the short story format suits her very well, as she tells amazing stories precisely but without making any compromise in character development or storyline.

In the title story, the author describes a young woman's attempt to leave her husband. Things have gone bad for the couple, compounded by the disappearance of their pet goat, Flora, has disappeared. The centerpiece of the collection is a triptych of stories about a woman named Juliet - "Chance", "Soon" and "Silence" - and her relationship with her mother and later with her daughter. "Chance" takes place in the 1960's and finds Juliet on a train as she unexpectedly discovers love. At the same time, Munro accurately shows Juliet's inner conflict as she hungers for a college education at a time when such notions for opportunity were ridiculed. "Soon" shows her as a young mother who goes to reconcile with her own parents and her ideas of faith. "Silence" picks up Juliet's story when she is an older woman estranged from her daughter and wondering what became of her life. The unexpected ending is haunting.

The remaining stories highlight aspects of youth both from a young girl's mindset and from the hindsight of an older woman. The best story is perhaps the last, "Powers", which is divided into titled sections. The first section begins in 1927. The last section, dating in the 1970s, describes a dream of the protagonist. In the dream, Munro writes that the past "begins to crumble behind her, to crumble and darken tenderly into something like soot and soft ash." It is this kind of observation that makes the author truly exceptional. She has written a lovely necklace of tales that illuminate human motive and behavior with piercing insight. Munro is a master of the small moment and how each one expands into revelations for which neither her characters nor we ever seem to be prepared. Highly recommended for both genders.

It doesn't take Alice Munro a lot of pages to tell a story, to build up feelings and believable characters. As a matter of fact, she can do that from sentence one - and move on with a story. What is mot fascinating in this writer body of work - and her latest "Runaway" is a terrific example - is that she can create a whole world and make it believable, using the amount of words that others would need in an introduction.

This world is inhabited by human beings dealing with human issues: love, lost, betrayal, fear, joy. Name a feeling, a sensation and you will find it in her stories. As Jonathan Franzen once said praise doesn't make justice to her, the best thing to do is read her books to understand why Munro is the best heiress to Chekov's style and stories.

In "Runaway" there is a sequence of three stories with the same main character. We start following the life of this woman when she is still in her late teens until when we are able to see her evolution as a human being, a daughter, a wife, a mother. This so called evolution involves many discoveries and deceptions. Since Munro is interested in the intimacy of her characters, what her reader gets is a deep look in the interior of this character throughout the years - and how her opinions and convictions change. Everything is mutable - it only depends on the moment.

The stories are always populated by women - some are strong, others are not. But they are always very real, very believable. We meet the girl who thinks she may be adopted, the young woman who meets a man after a play, another woman whose marriage is not happy and she wants to run away, and so on. But what would be banal in the hands of a less gifted writer is complex and interesting in Munro's.

Her stories threaten to burst out in life, to leave the pages of the book and create flesh and bones in the real world. But it seems she to work the other way round. Real world is the inspiration to her stories. And this is the best we can expect from a writer, translating real world in art.

These stories are gorgeous, beautiful pieces with a lot of charm and bittersweet flavors. However, not one of the characters seemed someone I would identify with or care too much about. They all seemed to be controlled and as cold as their northern settings. I understand why readers would admire Munro's writing style and even enjoy these stories, which are all very carefully written with a certain wry fatalistic viewpoint. Munro's truly skilled and talented, but I like to feel a bit more for the characters I read about. I can't tell if the stories didn't live up to the hype, or if they just weren't for me. Because certainly there isn't a lot to criticize with Munro's prose. She's an astute observer and wonderful writer; these particular stories just didn't grab me as I hoped they would.