The characters in Alice Munro's newest book, some anyway, are more extreme than I've been used to encountering in her earlier books. There are two triple-murderers, a woman whose childhood friend helped her kill another girl, a beloved son who chooses to be a derelict, the male narrator (rare for Alice) whose port-wine birthmark thwarts his whole life, and there are a statistiacally improbable number of "specials", people with disabilities of intelligence. The dysfunctional relationships, Munro's perennial subject, are more extreme, or perhaps just more quirky, than in previous portrayals. Munro's stories have always stayed close to home - southern Ontario - and close to plain folk, to herself, her family, her ordinary `others'. That's been the great strength of her work, really -- her honesty, her close-to-bone reality. Now in her seventies, in this book and in her 2006 "The View from Castle Rock", Munro seems to be stretching her range both in time and space, writing about emigrants of the previous generation, about people who weren't and couldn't have been neighbors ... and in the title story of this collection, "Too Much Happiness", she's written a long story/novella about a Russian woman mathematical prodigy of the 19th Century. It's easy to understand why she wants to stretch, to establish her claim to some universality and some ability to get beyond her own identity as a subject. No one who has read all of her previous work, as I have, could deny that she has "written the same story again and again." She has. Or rather, she has written her several stories again and again, like Leitmotives, in her eleven books. That is NOT, believe me, a weakness in her art. It's been her genius to be able to re-examine those stories - those experiences - from the perspectives of different ages-stages of her `unfinished' life. Each retelling has expanded the story, added rings to the tree trunk of memory.
Trees, wood, and wood-working... it occurs to me that `wood' has been as much a character in Munro's narrative cast as any human, and in this collection, one story is titled "Wood." `Cancer' has also intervened often enough, and in some of Munro's finest stories, to be considered a stock character. If anyone supposes that Munro hasn't written enough about the Great Themes, let me ask you: what theme is greater than one's own death?
Or than `age'? Munro has always written eloquently about the elderly, and about children. That's been another of her literary accomplishments. In this collection, however, `age' takes a different role. Here's the first sentence of the story Some Women: "I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am." Wow! Me too, Alice! I'm ten years behind you, 68 to your 78, but I'm keeping pace like a kid brother, edging relatively closer every year. Munro writes about the strangeness of living memories of dead-and-vanished worlds, of life-styles that now seem incomprehensibly extinct, of conversations recorded in her living conscious mind that seem archaic and exotic now. Age - being old in the always-new of life - is the unifying theme of Too Much Happiness.
Thematic unity is what makes Munro's eleven books of stories more than mere `collections'. Each of her books has been a story-suite, a genre of fiction distinct from the novel or novella, in which the various narratives entangle and infuse each other with meanings. That's the case with the first nine stories in Too Much Happiness. Frankly, I didn't begin to sense the impact of the first story, Dimensions, until I'd read the fourth or fifth. The final story, of the historical `feminist' martyr Sophia Kovalevsky, stands somewhat apart from the others. Perhaps it might have been better reserved for a different collection or published separately.
Munro is more tolerant of the failings of her women than of her men. More forgiving, though it's not that there's less to forgive. Many of her women, especially her first-person female narrators, are what my mother would have called "pills". My mother never used the B-word. But Munro's men `are who they are' - completely recognizable and plausible, from the outside - while Munro's women are ... herself. There's more of her strength: her honesty of perspective and her ability to forgive herself, after cross-examination, at least enough to be able to write her confessions. Munro is above all a confessional writer, of the generation of confessor-poets like Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop.
And perhaps I need to confess that I don't consider Too Much Happiness one of Munro's best books. No single story in it is as powerful as "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" from her 2001 collection Hateship/Friendship/Courtship/Loveship/Marriage, or the title story from Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You, or "What Do You Want to Know For?" from The View from Castle Rock. Those three stories are sublime. For them alone, Munro should rank as the "greatest writer who hasn't yet won the Nobel Prize." But Too Much Happiness is a powerful book, worthy of its lineage as Munro's twelfth suite of stories. I can't wait for her thirteenth!
