Dear Life: Stories Hardcover – Deckle Edge, November 13, 2012

For me, Alice Munro has been a late-in-life reading discovery, and pleasure. I had not read any of her short stories until after she had been awarded the Nobel Prize. (If, inexplicably, the Nobel Committee had never seen fit to give her its Prize, would I have missed out on her altogether? Heaven forfend.) As it is, DEAR LIFE is only the third book of hers that I have read, and she is so good that I just might, if I last long enough with eyesight and sentience, read another dozen.

DEAR LIFE was published in 2012, when Munro was eighty-one. As of now, it is her last book of entirely new material, as is likely to remain the case given her age. These late stories are more stripped down and straightforward, the prose simpler and sparer. But the stories are just as beguiling, and their characters just as nuanced and headstrong and surprising in their own usually quiet ways.

The book contains two groups of stories. The first consists of ten rather conventional short stories. All are set in Munro's native Canada, most of them in rural or small-town Ontario, with a few excursions into Toronto. Two of them are set during WWII, and two start in WWII and stretch into the Sixties. The characters are rather ordinary people, though they tend to be loners, existing a little outside the main currents of society. (Perhaps more of us fit that description than we would like to admit -- which may be one of Munro's lessons.)

The last four pieces in the book are personal to Alice Munro. In a brief introduction to them, she writes that they are "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact." She also writes that they are "the first and last--and the clearest--things I have to say about my own life." In one, she goes to a viewing at age six; the deceased, struck by a car while walking next to the road after a dance, is the young woman who helped around the house and took care of Alice after her brother and sister were born. Another takes place the summer after Alice had her appendix removed as well as a tumor the size of a turkey egg (apparently benign given that she is writing about it seventy years later), and her father masterfully eased her mind when she had unsettling thoughts about strangling her sister. I won't attempt to summarize the other two. All four, however, are special -- even more so than the ten short stories in the first grouping.

This is the 7th volume of short stories of Alice Munro that I've read (and reviewed). It is like coming home to an old friend; one who knows all too well the stories of the lives of the people one grew up with. How did so-and-so turn out? She knows, and she can explain the twists and turns of their lives in wonderful incisive prose. Never too much, just the essence of the story, a novel's worth of character development distilled into 20 or 30 pages. Faulkner famously knew the many stories of the people who inhabited the area around Oxford Mississippi that he called Yoknapatawpha County. Munro's characters will range over much of Canada, but they are centered on small town life in Huron County, western Ontario. Both have been awarded, rightly, the Nobel Prize for Literature. And, for what it is worth, I've given each of Munro's six collections of short stories that I have previously read a "6-star" rating at Amazon, as I have this current collection.

Love, and un-love, its "anti-matter" complement are woven into most of her stories. So too is the impact of the Great Depression as well as World War II on rural Canadian life. Her stories weave back and forth across time, and a character's motivation is often explained in words that ring so true, and you have to wonder how Munro would know them. For example, one of the longest stories is entitled "Train." A soldier is coming home from World War II, and inexplicable hops off the train before it arrives at his destination. He stops at a farm house, and takes up with the woman who is living there alone. He proves himself handy, performing those essential functions that some women seek, often described as "taking out the garbage." In this story, as in some others, there is the chance meeting of someone from your youth, that you had not seen for 40 years. And then there is the motivational insight, summed up in a pithy observation of a woman in far-off Southhampton, England: "That's enough, sonny boy, you're down and out."

In this collection the last four stories are directly drawn from Munro's life, or, as she says: "I believe they are the first and last - and the closest - things I have to say about my own life." As with so many stories, they strongly resonated, and stirred up memories of my own childhood I had never truly reflected on. Like, for example, how one's childhood home was orientated, and the distance it was from the town, and how that might have impacted one's development. There was an older "caregiver," as we call them today, how she suddenly disappeared, and how that was explained. It has been decades since I thought about the first time I was in the hospital, age 6, to have my tonsils removed, and the crazy hallucinations that ether can induce. One of Munro's stories about her own first operation - her only one - stirred up those memories. As did the last story, whose title was used for this collection, and is a specific phrase that has numerous usages: "Dear Life." It was a reminder that in those seemingly more innocent times of one's youth that there were "crazy people" out there that could have brought your life to an early end, save for that all important element of chance.

The power of the Nobel. Munro is now read much more today. Currently this book has 586 reviews, and I am confident that number will soon surpass a thousand. When I posted my reviews of her other collections, many had only 10-20 reviews, and in some cases, that is still true, for example The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose,Friend of My Youth: Stories and The Progress of Love. I would strongly encourage consideration being given to each of those collections also, as they are of the same quality of this one: 6-stars.

Alice Munro is unquestionably my favorite author. Her short stories, in this and other books, are jewels. I can read her stories over and over, and each time I take something more and find a deeper, richer insight. This collection also has a few stories at the end that are autobiographical, which is a gift for Munro's readers because she has said she will not write any more. I think she deserves to retire if she wants to--she's given us such a wealth of stories to read and reread.

Most of her stories take place in her country, Canada, often in small towns in the countryside or Toronto or Vancouver. The stories pull you in, sometimes you're not even sure who's telling the story at first or if you should like them. Sometimes the stories change point of view, but never feel contrived. In one story a young marriage breaks up (and we see it from the wife's point of view) and decades later the husband (his point of view now) revisits the wife's best friend at the time of the breakup. There is a dreamy quality to this tale; the man is elderly and has a much younger wife now, but he seems to feel a need to clear up something from the past. Then we learn that he could have looked up his ex-wife in his travels, but didn't choose to, instead dropping in on her friend. Such mystery and so many clues are available in these stories, but things aren't ever spelled out. Munro is a genius at getting us to think about and delve into the characters she creates.

I would recommend this book and anything by Alice Munro wholeheartedly, without question.