The View from Castle Rock: Stories (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

[Signature]Reviewed by Sigrid NunezTen collections of stories and one novel have made Alice Munro one of the most praised fiction writers of our time. In The View from Castle Rock her full range of gifts is on display: indelible characters, deep insights about human behavior and relationships, vibrant prose, and seductive, suspenseful storytelling.Munro, in a foreword, tells how, a decade ago, she began looking into her family history, going all the way back to 18th-century Scotland. This material eventually became the stories presented here in part 1, "No Advantages." Munro also worked on "a special set of stories," none of which she included in previous collections, because they were "rather more personal than the other stories I had written." They now appear here in part 2, "Home." With both parts, Munro says, she has had a free hand with invention. Munro has used personal material in her fiction before, but at 75, she has given us something much closer to autobiography. Much of the book concerns people who have died, and places and ways of life that no longer exist or have been completely transformed, and though Munro is temperamentally unsentimental the mood is often elegiac.One difficulty that can arise with this kind of hybrid work is that the reader is likely to be distracted by the itch to know whether an event really occurred, or how much has been made up or embellished. In the title story, the reader is explicitly told that almost everything has been invented, and this enthralling multilayered narrative about an early 19th-century Scottish family's voyage to the New World is the high point of the collection. On the other hand, "What Do You Want to Know For?" at the heart of which is an account of a cancer scare Munro experienced, reads like pure memoir and seems not only thin by comparison but insufficiently imagined as a short story.Perhaps none of the stories here is quite up to the mastery of earlier Munro stories such as "The Beggar Maid" or "The Albanian Virgin." But getting this close to the core of the girl who would become the master is a privilege and a pleasure not to be missed. And reliably as ever when the subject is human experience, Munro's stories—whatever the proportions of fiction and fact—always bring us the truth. (Nov.)Sigrid Nunez's most recent novel, The Last of Her Kind, will be published in paperback by Picador in December.
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From The Washington Post

My mother's childhood was shaped by a small town named Boorowa in the flat plains west of Australia's Great Dividing Range, and the stories she told of her years there shaped my childhood in its turn. Boorowa and my mother's tales about it were much on my mind as I read Alice Munro's latest collection of stories, The View from Castle Rock. Munro's rural Canadian settings might be a planet away, and snow-blasted rather than sun-baked, but they are similar places of nickel-edged wood stoves, worn linoleum and worn-out hearts, where adults move tight-lipped through accustomed chores and a child in search of signs of love will need to crack a hard code if she is to find any.

The View from Castle Rock is, in some important ways, a departure for this masterful Canadian writer. Half of the collection is more or less historical fiction, written at a considerable distance from the probing investigations of contemporary psyches for which Munro is so celebrated. For more than a decade, she tells us in a brief foreword, she has been collecting information about a branch of her family that came from a valley described in the Statistical Account of Scotland in 1799 as having "no advantages." She takes that grim judgment as the title for part one of her collection, a set of five connected stories that transport her forebears from their mean, mossy Borders village to a new world that provides little of the glory or prosperity they might have expected from such a bold leap into the unknown.

The second part of the book, "Home," offers six stories that seem at first rather more familiarly Munro-esque. A young girl is at their center, an intelligent outsider, judged by the joyless rectitude of a small place and judging it in her turn. She is the girl who becomes the woman who leaves, who has an intellectual and sexual existence far beyond the parameters of her hometown's mores and expectations, and who, when she returns, must account for the losses as well as the gains that her choices have brought her. We have met this girl/woman many times in Munro's stories; the writer's genius has been to find so many rich permutations within this familiar narrative arc.

The difference, in these new stories, is that Munro herself distinguishes them as "a special set . . . closer to my own life than the other stories I had written." The point of the earlier works, she writes, even the first-person ones, was to make a story. The point of these is to explore "a life, my own life." This set, she says, pays "more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does."

So it is not very surprising to find, in the pages of a story titled "Fathers," something that might well stand as the "Munro Manifesto." The girl in this first-person story looks back at herself as she enters her teens and half befriends, half persecutes a younger child named Frances who has moved into the rural Canadian community from Chicago. Invited to Frances's home, the narrator is put off balance, even slightly sickened, by the playfulness of Frances's parents, their attentions to their child and their overt demonstrations of affection. "What was this menace? Was it just that of love, or of lovingness? If that was what it was, then you would have to say that I had made its acquaintance too late."

In her own dour home, overt loving is in short supply. Emotion of all kinds is suspect. Even intellectual curiosity -- to be interested in the "why" of something not directly relevant to chores or subsistence -- is frowned upon. To be the bearer of gossip or news -- the storyteller, which, by her early teens, she aspires to be -- she has had to learn restraint. "I had learned how to do this in a way that would not get me rebuked for being sarcastic or vulgar or told that I was too smart for my own good. I had mastered a deadpan, even demure style that could make people laugh even when they thought they shouldn't and that made it hard to tell whether I was innocent or malicious."

Clearly, Munro is still drawing on the capital of those early lessons. That deadpan girl is very present in a story titled "Home," where the narrator, now an adult, returns to visit her ailing father. After her mother's death, he has remarried, to a woman named Irlma. Irlma's ancient dog, Buster, "smells of rot and river weeds" and is experiencing acute bowel trouble. In a virtuoso set-piece that could well define the art of deadpan, Munro gives Irlma a monologue in which she regales her stepdaughter with a full account of Buster's eventual bowel evacuation as she serves up ham sandwiches and coffee with cream. Somehow, the old dog's agony is rendered hilarious. But it is the guilty, suppressed laughter of the child in church, who knows very well that her elders are watching and marking her down for a caning.

One particular story from my mother's Boorowa childhood kept coming to my mind as I read Munro. My mother stayed with her grandmother, the town midwife, who, despite her calling, had a prude's distaste for the facts of the body and very little time for the questions of small girls. So when my mother asked where she came by all the newborns that appeared so regularly in her arms, she fobbed her off by telling her that she found the infants in the parsley patch. My mother says she spent weeks, waking before dawn and searching that patch, in the hopes that she might find a baby before her grandmother got there.

Reading Munro, I often feel like that little girl, my mother, shivering in her dew-drenched nightgown, determinedly searching for an elusive, valuable thing. And that thing is the secret to Munro's prose. There are no pyrotechnics in it, very little poetry. The few similes are apt but not dazzlingly so. There is suspense, but it is contrived without resort to any obvious devices. In short, Munro is the illusionist whose trick can never be exposed. And that is because there is no smoke, there are no mirrors. Munro really does know magic: how to summon the spirits and the emotions that animate our lives.

Reviewed by Geraldine Brooks
Copyright 20, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (November 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400042828
• ISBN-13: 978-1400042821
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #393,149 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A poignant collection of stories loosely based on actual events in Monro's family history, December 8, 2006

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

When it comes to writing short stories, Canadian author Alice Munro (RUNAWAY) is one of the best. She has published 11 new collections of short stories, a volume of SELECTED STORIES and a full-length novel. Her stories' timelines and subject matter range from birth to death and hit every thinkable topic in between. She is the master of unmasking feelings through words, and her landscapes are so vividly depicted that one can envision them jumping off the page and into reality.

In this latest collection, Munro turns her attention inward and delves deeper into her own experiences than ever before. These 12 stories --- including the epilogue's sole story entitled "Messenger" --- are slight variations and half-true fabrications of actual events that took place over the last few centuries on one side of her family's history. As she writes in the Foreword, "You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on. And the part of this book that might be called family history has expanded into fiction, but always within the outline of a true narrative."

The first half of THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK includes a set of five stories, all loosely based on her family's journey from the Ettrick Valley in Scotland to North America and the beginnings of their lives there. In "No Advantages," she describes her poor, hard-working Scottish ancestors in great detail --- half, what was; and the other half, what might have been. In "The View from Castle Rock," a young boy catches a glimpse of America --- and, in turn, his father's dreams --- while perched atop Castle Rock in Edinburgh. (Years later, the affirmation of his hunch that his father was drunk that day and that "America" was merely Fife makes the rest of the story seem all the sweeter.) Here, and continuing on into "Illinois," "The Wilds of Morris Township" and "Working for a Living," the hardships of daily toil, disease, famine and sacrifice, and the saving graces of religious faith and family loyalty, are felt on every page.

The second half of CASTLE ROCK is more loosely connected and consists of stories written during but not published in her recent short story collections. "They were not memoirs," she writes, "but they were closer to my own life than the other stories I had written, even in the first person...I was doing something closer to what a memoir does --- exploring a life, but not in an austere or rigorously factual way. I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as searchingly as I could." And, as in the first section, the characters around this "self" take off and create a gloriously imagined life of their own.

What stands out most in these stories (and in most, if not all, of her others) is Munro's uncanny gift for turning a phrase and her ability to capture the essence of a moment within the bookends of a few carefully chosen words. In "Lying Under the Apple Tree" --- one of the best in the collection --- a young girl's first fumblings with lust and a Salvation Army boy of lower class is beautifully portrayed in the pairing of question and observation: "Or does it always seem natural to whisper in the dark? Or when you have gone weak in the legs but aching, determined, in another part of your body." In both "Home" and "What Do You Want to Know For?" --- two equally magnificent and ruminant pieces about the nature of belonging and feeling at home in one's present while yearning to grasp the unattainable past and lay claim to the unforeseeable future --- there are countless instances when the urge to stop and meditate on a paragraph or a sentence should certainly be heeded. These are the passages that encapsulate the marrow of life, and in Munro's capable hands they ring true every time.

Regarding her inspiration for THE VIEW FROM CASTLE ROCK, she writes, "Some of the characters gave themselves to me in their own words, others rose out of their situations. Their words and my words, a curious re-creation of lives, in a given setting that was as truthful as our notion of the past can ever be." It is this natural talent for seamlessly fusing habit with possibility, permanence with intention, and fact with fiction, that makes Munro's stories such a unique pleasure to read.

--- Reviewed by Alexis Burling

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Five-Star Career of Writing, November 27, 2006

By	Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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There's more than a hint of the Icelandic saga about some of the stories in this collection: the tough-minded matter-of-fact narration; the non-judgmental, external point of view. Only briefly and incidentally does Munro peek into any single character's self-awareness. Like the Icelandic sagas, these are chronicles of the author's ancestors, written with the implicit pride that such a family deserves to be chronicled. For anyone who has read Munro's previous stories, The View from Castle Rock will come as a surprise, and those who admire her emotionally acute self-dissection may be disappointed. I prefer to give Munro the latitude to write differently, particularly since she crafts her new genre so skillfully. This may not be her best collection ever or contain any story as good as her earlier masterpieces, but if there is any living writer in English more deserving of the Nobel than Alice Munro, I'd like to know who.
Added after re-reading earlier in the day: I need to retract one element of what I wrote before; the last story in the collection, "What Do You Want to Know For?", is a very great story, one of Munro's most polished ever.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars superb anthology, December 3, 2006

By	Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews (#1 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

These twelve new short stores are broken into three sections. Part One/No Advantages contains five tales from the author's ancestry as her family sails from Scotland to America. Part Two/Home includes six stories mostly occurring in the Lake Huron area that will be much more familiar to fans of Alice Munro. Finally a one tale Epilogue/Messenger that ties to two segments together. Each contribution is terrific and will enhance Ms. Munro's reputation as one of the best modern day short story writers. This reviewer's personal favorite is the "Roots" like first entry "No Advantages" though the others like the title story are well written, filled with depth so that the audience feels they are either in the Scotland or near Lake Huron, past and present. Once again Ms. Munro vividly brings to life the seemingly ennui everyday people, but makes each person seems so alive and vibrant with this superb anthology.

Harriet Klausner