"fiction in review: alice munro," jane mendelsohn

1 5 9R

F I C T I O N I N

R E V I E W

J A N E M E N D E L S O H N

It is a privilege and a pleasure to write about Alice Munro. When Ibegan this piece, before Munro had won the Nobel Prize, I wasthrilled to have a chance to discuss her work and the book she hasclaimed will be its culmination, the extraordinary short-story col-lection Dear Life. Now that her literary importance has been soclearly recognized and rewarded, this essay feels less as if it shouldbe a review, or even an appreciation, and more as though it de-serves to be a celebration. Let the champagne flow, especially forthose of us who have been reading, admiring, marveling at, anddeeply moved by Munro’s stories these past few decades.

To begin with: the genius of Munro, and the reason legions ofher fans were overjoyed when she won the Nobel, is that she hasnot, as so many writers, artists, and other people have, beenstriving for greatness. About ten or so years ago someone men-tioned to me how impressed he was that a couple of mutual friendswere ‘‘really going for it, really striving for greatness.’’ We werestanding in the playground in Washington Square Park, and I was

D e a r L i f e : S t o r i e s , by Alice Munro (Vintage, 336 pp., $15.95 paper)

1 6 0 M E N D E L S O H N

Y

pushing my daughter on a swing. I nodded my head but vividlyremember thinking, ‘‘Striving for greatness is a prescription formediocrity.’’ (Or tragedy, I could have added.) I thought it becauseI had spent my life reading books by brilliant writers who hadbeen delivering that message for centuries, but I believed it be-cause I had been enjoying and learning from the stories of AliceMunro since I was a teenager.

Striving for greatness suggests a narcissism that is entirelyabsent from Munro’s work. She writes about narcissistic charac-ters, the provincial mother with a grandiose self-image being themost frequent (and the most likely to use a phrase like ‘‘strivingfor greatness’’), and she explores and exposes all kinds of self-absorption, small-mindedness, intentional and unintentional cru-elties, and human failings in practically every one of her stories.She even describes in interviews, and reveals in the autobiographi-cal air that emanates sometimes from the stories themselves,choices made in the struggles between marriage and self, mother-hood and writing that could be described – that even she de-scribes – as selfish. However, her sensibility, her unsparing andbroad perspective, is not narcissistic. And selfishness of the kindshe writes about is often the result of social, historical, and eco-nomic constraints that she also details with unerring precision.The vision of her work is outward-looking, generous, profoundlyinterested in existence. She has been pursuing this interest herwhole career with steadfast focus. (In my mind she appears as abrave, beloved, and slightly, charmingly comic figure: an indefati-gable sailor crossing an ocean alone, hand on the tiller, hair in thewind.) It is not that she hasn’t been writing great stories, or eventrying to write great stories – she has – it’s that she has beenconcentrating on the task at hand, not on an image of herself orother people’s ideas about her or her work. At least that is thefeeling, the open secret – one of her collections is titled Open

Secrets – she consistently conveys.So Alice Munro has become, for many writers and readers, a

kind of hero, a female hero, or a heroine, whichever term youprefer, and this is fitting because female heroism, as it manifestsitself in ordinary lives, is her great subject. Yes, she can certainlybe considered one of those regional writers whose work extends to

F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W 1 6 1

R

all humanity; she writes often about small towns in Ontario,where she grew up and later lived. But her stories also take placein major cities such as Toronto and Vancouver. Yes she can becalled a master of the short story; this is also true. But her gifts forstructure, compression, language, observation, and playing withtime make it possible for her to communicate a wisdom and visionwithout which all her knowledge of a region, all her artistry indescribing it, would not be enough to make her the kind of writershe is, a writer whose close counterpart in my mind is not onlyChekhov, to whom she is often compared, but George Eliot, withwhose specificity and depth as well as perspective and subjectmatter she shares so much. Without Munro’s sensibility and sub-ject matter, her radiant lack of narcissism and deep empathy andcuriosity about the female hero living a so-called ordinary life, shewould have been a remarkable shaper of stories, an outstandingliterary practitioner, but not nearly so great a writer, not AliceMunro.

Although my image of Munro casts her on a sailboat crossing theocean, the quintessential Munro heroine is often to be found on atrain or a bus, usually crossing some part of Canada, always in themidst of the journey of her life. Sometimes she is at the station.Sometimes she intends to be on a train or a bus or at the stationbut isn’t, and instead steps o√ or outside the route of life. In theoften cited, luxuriant yet tightly plotted ‘‘Carried Away’’ from1991, Louisa, the central character, comes to a new town, falls inlove, lives her complex life filled with unexpected disappoint-ments and happiness, and ends up, after a visit to a doctor abouther heart trouble, moving on, but unsure of where to go or what todo. She finds herself, as the result of a name she read in a news-paper – coincidentally the same name as that of her long-deadfirst love – sitting in a park watching a local labor union ceremonyat which the man with the same name, ‘‘Jack Agnew,’’ is supposedto speak. Louisa is overcome by agitation before the ceremonybegins. When a stranger asks her if she is all right she answers, ‘‘Ihave to catch a bus.’’ She then decides: ‘‘She would just go and sitin the bus depot until it was time for her to go home.’’

But she remembers that the bus depot is being rebuilt, and the


Y

train station had been removed during World War II. She knowsshe didn’t arrive by train or bus, but doesn’t seem to know how shecame to the town or how she is getting home (presumably she isbeing picked up by her son or stepdaughter, but she doesn’t men-tion this). Louisa stops to get a Coke at a co√ee shop. While there,she bumps into her lost love, the long-dead Jack Agnew, and theyhave a conversation, or so she thinks. As it turns out she has ‘‘goneunder a wave’’:

You could say anything you liked about what had happened –but what it amounted to was going under a wave. She hadgone under and through it and was left with a cold sheen onher skin, a beating in her ears, a cavity in her chest, andrevolt in her stomach. It was anarchy she was up against – adevouring muddle. Sudden holes and impromptu tricks andradiant vanishing consolations.

This is a beautiful passage, both as a description of a heart-induced anxiety attack and also as a description of Louisa’s entirelife – ‘‘sudden holes and impromptu tricks and radiant vanishingconsolations’’ – and of almost any Alice Munro story. When aMunro heroine is not traveling on the train or bus of her life, she isapt to fall into these waters, or to notice them, these waves, this‘‘anarchy she was up against.’’

What helps Louisa steady herself is a group of Mennonites.They enter the co√ee shop and Louisa thinks, ‘‘These Mennonitesettlings are a blessing. The plop of behinds on chairs, the crack-ling of the candy bag, the meditative sucking and soft conversa-tions.’’ It is as though she is welcomed back to the world of thesenses, the everyday. Or is she? A Mennonite girl o√ers her abutterscotch mint, and Louisa ‘‘sucks on it as they do on theirs,and allows that taste to promise her some reasonable continu-ance.’’ This scene is written so that one can see in it a hint ofLouisa’s death. Maybe she even has died as we were reading:‘‘ ‘What place is this?’ She said to the woman beside her.’’ Theparagraph ends there, and so does what we know of Louisa fromthat point in her life.

Most interpreters of Munro claim her as a staunch realist, butscenes such as these show that her work transcends such defini-tions. Even if this scene is meant to be strictly ‘‘realistic,’’ what it


R

reveals are the immense depths of mystery and multiple angles ofperception that exist in everyday reality.

Mennonites also figure in one of Munro’s new stories, a compan-ion piece of sorts to ‘‘Carried Away’’ – and a powerful story in itsown right – called, as if summing up the essential image ofMunro’s work, ‘‘Train.’’ ‘‘Train’’ is unlike many of her stories inthat it is told primarily from a man’s point of view. In this case, theman is Jackson, a soldier on his way home from the war who,instead of completing the journey and returning to his fiancée,jumps o√ the train and wanders o√ into a di√erent life, anotherstory. Jackson from ‘‘Train’’ could be Jack Agnew from ‘‘CarriedAway’’ if, instead of returning to his fiancée (named Grace in‘‘Carried Away,’’ Ileane in ‘‘Train’’) and thereby breaking Louisa’sheart and later dying in a factory accident, he had never comeback at all.

In ‘‘Train,’’ after Jackson jumps o√ the train he drifts into theworld of Belle, whom he meets as she is ‘‘half coaxing, half-scolding’’ a little Jersey into the stable. It doesn’t take much scold-ing or coaxing to get Jackson to settle into Belle’s life, for themoment before he follows her into her house he hears the sound ofMennonites riding by: ‘‘For a while now he’d been hearing apeculiar sound. The road rose up a hill, and from over that hillcame a clip-clop, clip-clop. Along with the clip-clop some littletinkle or whistling.’’

The Mennonites are ‘‘all dressed in black, with proper blackhats on their heads.’’ They seem to be for Munro a recurring imageof death: ‘‘The sound was coming from them. It was singing.Discreet high-pitched little voices, as sweet as could be. Theynever looked at him as they went by. That chilled him. The buggyin the barn and the horse in the field were nothing in com-parison.’’ Jackson chooses domesticity over the Mennonites. He iswilling to jump o√ the train to avoid the life waiting for him athome, but he cannot face the people who ‘‘seemed quite cheerful’’in ‘‘Carried Away’’ and whose singing is ‘‘as sweet as could be’’ in‘‘Train.’’ Their cheery self-absorption, both calming and terrify-ing, is a complex death symbol, unthreatening but cold, sweet butblack, steadily driving down the road at all times but something tobe avoided, not succumbed to, until the end.


Y

Jackson makes a life with Belle in her ramshackle house, andthey become a kind of brother and sister pairing who function asan old married couple. Belle is sixteen years older than Jackson.They are even at one point mistaken for brother and sister Men-nonites (they are neither) by a secondhand car dealer: ‘‘That shookJackson up but at least it was better than husband and wife.’’Jackson would rather be a husband than a Mennonite. He andBelle live together for years. Eventually, Belle gets cancer andJackson accompanies her to the hospital in Toronto for an opera-tion. Perhaps now he will have to face death or Mennonites, but asit turns out he doesn’t. Belle survives, and when Jackson comes tosee her she asks him to get her a Coke (reminiscent of Louisa inthe co√ee shop), but it’s against orders for him to get her one. Belletells Jackson she wants to escape.

‘‘If you won’t I’ll do it myself. I’ll get to the train stationmyself.’’

‘‘There isn’t any passenger train that goes up our wayanymore.’’

She abruptly gives up on her plans for escape – no Coke, no train –and tells him she is going to leave him her house in her will.

But Belle still does not die. The second time Jackson visits hershe is doped up, but has been reborn. She ‘‘looked a lot youngerthan the woman he had brought to the hospital.’’ She can’t concen-trate on what he says because she ‘‘seemed to be in a state ofamazement. Controlled amazement.’’ In this state, Belle opens upto him as she never has before and tells him the most significantstory from her childhood, about her father seeing her naked whenshe was a teenager. Her mother had been a semi-invalid, and herfather had come upon Belle by accident, but he hadn’t lookedaway: ‘‘My face looking into the mirror and him looking at me inthe mirror and also what was behind me and I couldn’t see. Itwasn’t in any sense a normal look.’’ When her father later apolo-gized to her she could not forgive him right away. He left thehouse, and not long after, ‘‘I heard the train coming and all at oncethe commotion and the screeching which was the train brakes.’’Her father had been run over by the train.

While Belle is recounting her story and her thoughts about it,


R

the reader understands this: although ‘‘Train’’ has been told pri-marily from Jackson’s point of view it is Belle who is the hero ofthis story. In telling and reinterpreting the central story of herchildhood she is able to forgive her father and herself. ‘‘Now I havegot a real understanding of it and it was nobody’s fault. It was thefault of human sex in a tragic situation.’’ In facing death Belle haslooked at life directly; she has gone on a journey and come out theother side. She says, ‘‘I feel so released. It’s not that I don’t feel thetragedy, but I have got outside the tragedy, is what I mean. It is justthe mistakes of humanity. You mustn’t think because I’m smilingthat I don’t have compassion. I have serious compassion. But I amrelieved. I have to say I somehow feel happy.’’ Jackson listens, buthe is glad when it is time to leave. ‘‘Just the mistakes of humanity’’is not a phrase he is ready to understand.

The story does not end there. As in many Munro stories, it con-tinues past the point at which other stories would long be over.Jackson never returns to Belle, but the story follows him as hedrifts into another life in Toronto. In Munro’s universe the pos-sibility is raised that maybe Jackson can’t understand Belle’s storyor stay with her because he is a man, or because he has been asoldier and seen war, or both. He has seen death, maybe too muchof it, but not, like Belle, faced death and come out the other side.He is still drifting, and cannot forgive himself for his past mistakes.

We drift with Jackson into his next job working as a janitor of abuilding. One day a woman comes looking for her daughter, whohas run away, and Jackson realizes from the sound of the woman’svoice that it is Ileane, the girl he left waiting at the train station.The scene in which Jackson, unseen, overhears Ileane talk to herlandlord about her missing daughter reads like a mirror image ofthe scene in ‘‘Carried Away’’ in which Louisa talks to Jack Agnewin the co√ee shop. In ‘‘Train,’’ Jackson puts together Ileane’s lifestory from what he overhears, but he never reveals himself. Theowner gestures for Jackson to come out of hiding but ‘‘Jacksonshook his head violently.’’ He remains to Ileane as much a phan-tom as Jack Agnew is to Louisa. Ileane has a 7-Up, which theowner gets for her: ‘‘He might have thought that more ladylikethan a Coke.’’ Again, the Coke. Louisa had a Coke. Belle in thehospital asks for a Coke. These Munro heroines want to taste the


Y

sweet but less ladylike ‘‘real’’ thing, as it used to be called in theadvertisements.

The story flows on, much like ‘‘Carried Away,’’ to give us moreinformation from before the beginning of the action, going fartherback in time to when Jackson first met Ileane. We learn that hehad a nasty stepmother, who seems to have acted on her sexualimpulses toward him, unlike Belle’s father. We learn that this iswhy Jackson could not consummate his relationship with Ileane,either physically before he went to war or later, when he chose notto come home. ‘‘When he was as young as six or seven he hadlocked up his step-mother’s fooling, what she called her fooling orher teasing.’’ So Jackson had a secret just like Belle’s but worse.And more: ‘‘He had run out into the street after dark and she gothim in but she saw there’d be some real running away if she didn’tstop so she stopped.’’ In other words, Jackson tried to leave, likeBelle’s father, but he couldn’t get away. And unlike Belle he cannotforgive the mistakes of humanity, perhaps because in his case themistake was not really a mistake, was closer to an intentionalcruelty. He could possibly forgive himself, understand why henever returned to Ileane, but he seems too damaged for this reve-lation. Instead, Jackson spends his life running away.

The symmetry of this story, the mirroring of Belle’s and Jack-son’s lives, their reflected stories, their opposite ways of handlingconflict, and their movement in di√erent directions, like trainspulling away from each other, is beautifully maintained. And be-yond the symmetry within the story is the story’s symmetricalrelationship to ‘‘Carried Away.’’ All this is captured in the centraldescription of the mirror that Belle describes: ‘‘My face lookinginto the mirror and him looking at me in the mirror and also whatwas behind me and I couldn’t see.’’ Here Munro plays masterfullywith perspective. This image describes what Munro is doing in thestory, and prepares us for the epiphany that Belle has in the hospi-tal, when she sees what she couldn’t see before. The tragedy ofhuman sex. The mistakes of humanity. This is a mirror out ofVelázquez or Manet. This is art. This is the real thing.

And to complete the symmetry: when Jackson leaves his job as ajanitor, ‘‘he said that he had been called away, without indicatingwhy or where to.’’ He empties his bank account and leaves late inthe evening and gets on a train. ‘‘He slept on and o√ during the


R

night and in one of those snatches he saw the little Mennoniteboys go by in their cart. He heard their small voices singing.’’ LikeLouisa toward the end of ‘‘Carried Away,’’ Jackson sees the Men-nonites. But he doesn’t sit with them or face them. He gets o√ thetrain in a new town.

‘‘Train’’ isn’t merely a mirror image of ‘‘Carried Away’’; it is tiltedat a slight angle, something like the mirror in Velázquez’s The

Rokeby Venus or in Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère. This tiltingpermits us to see the world from multiple angles. It also creates afeeling of deep space, and ‘‘Train’’ goes even farther (pun in-tended) than ‘‘Carried Away,’’ allowing Belle to have her realiza-tion, which is more complete than Louisa’s ‘‘wave’’ in ‘‘CarriedAway.’’ Belle’s understanding is akin to Lily Briscoe’s moment atthe end of Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse: ‘‘She had had hervision.’’ But there is always more. In ‘‘Train’’ this is Jackson, hisdamage. Munro leaves it to the reader to see that Belle’s vision isnot necessarily complete, but the story itself approaches a sublimecompleteness.

‘‘Carried Away’’ is the work of a mature artist in full control; butthe stories in Dear Life transcend even this. Aspects of these storiescan be read as mirrors of the earlier stories, and all the storiesexplore the same themes Munro has examined over the years:marriage, motherhood, sex, accidents, sickness, small-town society.The new stories contain many of the same images and tropes:trains, buses, dangerous water, Mennonites, life-changing letters.But in Dear Life, Munro explores them in ways that feel e√ortlessand deep: passages seem to be almost about nothing and thensuddenly jolt the reader into a moment of emotional force. Theyare like very good, very old diamonds, so clear that they appearcolorless and plain until they catch the light just so and refractevery color all at once.

Toward the end of the first story in Dear Life, ‘‘To Leave Japan,’’the main character, Greta, takes a train across Canada in an at-tempt to reconnect with a man she met briefly at a party. She ismarried, and her husband is away on work. She takes her daughterKaty with her, has a dalliance with a fellow traveler, and whiledoing so loses sight of Katy. It’s a storyline that has come up inMunro tales before: the unhappily wed or overwhelmed mother


Y

distracted and losing sight of her child, then feeling guilt-ridden(most notably in ‘‘Miles City, Montana,’’ from The Progress of

Love, 1986). But the scene in which Greta searches for Katy hasacquired new power. This is Greta looking for Katy:

A new fear then. Supposing Katy had made her way to one orother end of the car and had actually managed to get a dooropen. Or followed a person who had opened it ahead of her.Between the cars there was a short walkway where you wereactually walking over the place where the cars joined up.There you could feel the train’s motion in a sudden andalarming way. A heavy door behind you and another in front,and on either side of the walkway clanging metal plates.These covered the steps that were let down when the trainwas stopped.

You always hurried through these passages, where thebanging and swaying reminded you how things were puttogether in a way that seemed not so inevitable after all.Almost casual, yet in too much of a hurry, that banging andswaying.

The door at the end was heavy even for Greta. Or she wasdrained by her fear. She pushed mightily with her shoulder.

Greta finds Katy between the cars, ‘‘amazed and alone,’’ and theterror of the search inspires Greta to be a more attentive mother.But the fear and disorientation of the scene are not quickly forgot-ten. As I read through Dear Life I kept remembering that earlyscene, and in thinking about it, and about the predominance oftrains in the book, I was reminded of the most famous of literarytrains, the trains in Anna Karenina, beginning with the one onwhich Anna rides back home to Petersburg from Moscow, dis-tracted by thoughts of Vronsky: ‘‘She kept having moments ofdoubt whether the carriage was moving forwards or backwards, orstanding still’’; ‘‘Anna felt as if she was falling through the floor.’’When the train stops briefly at a station, she meets Vronsky on theplatform, and he tells her that he has been following her, notunlike the way Katy explains she was looking for her mother.

But of course there is another train in Anna Karenina, the onethat Anna throws herself under. It seemed to me as I was readingDear Life that one of the main projects of Munro’s work has been


R

to discover stories for women that do not require them to throwthemselves under a train. Belle’s father is run over in ‘‘Train,’’ andJackson jumps on and o√ trains his whole life. But Munro’s hero-ines ride the trains and take what the journey brings. They mayhave disappointments, a√airs, struggles with motherhood, even beostracized or cut o√ from money and society as a result, yet theyalmost always find some ‘‘reasonable continuance,’’ as Louisa doesin ‘‘Carried Away.’’ Even if that continuance is death, it is notsuicide. And even if it’s a bout with cancer and close to the end oflife, it involves an awakening, an acceptance, an awareness of ‘‘justthe mistakes of humanity.’’ It is as if Munro has been rewriting herown version of Anna Karenina, one in which Anna, in spite of hermistakes, is allowed to have Levin’s revelations and awakening.What a project, what a journey, what a great story.

Many essays could, and will, be written about Dear Life. The titlealone is perfect. (It calls to mind another brilliant book title,Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost. There is a fascinating essay to be writtenon the relationship between Munro’s and Roth’s work, but that isanother story.) The layers of meaning in the title – holding on tosomething or someone for dear life, writing a letter to life ofgratitude and farewell, an everyday phrase – all these capture theessence of Munro’s work. But the most useful reading of the titlecan be found in the final four stories of the book, which Munrointroduces thus: ‘‘The final four works in this book are not quitestories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical infeeling, though not, sometimes, entirely in fact.’’ She adds, ‘‘Ibelieve they are the first and last – and the closest – things I haveto say about my own life.’’ In true Munro form she leaves uspondering every word. By closest does she mean truest to reality orclosest to her heart? Has she been holding on to them all theseyears for dear life? And to what extent is she now letting them go?

These four extraordinary pieces are ‘‘The Eye,’’ ‘‘Night,’’ ‘‘Voices,’’and ‘‘Dear Life.’’ They contain all the themes of Munro’s work.Everything is in them. I won’t spoil readers’ enjoyment by writingtoo much about them here. I have already given enough away. ButI will say that they are compelling, moving, profound. And forlongtime readers of Munro they are fascinating, showing us morethan just glimmers of the girl and woman behind the stories,


Y

giving us insight and a sense of the origins of the characters andmotifs we have been traveling with all these years. They are agenerous gift from a great writer. In the not-quite-story ‘‘DearLife,’’ Munro tells a tale about when she was a baby and her housewas stalked, in a sense, by an old woman who had lived there as achild. Munro’s mother is frightened one day when the womancomes around the house, and she grabs Munro out of her babycarriage, ‘‘grabbed me up, as she said, for dear life.’’ Her mothergoes from room to room holding the baby until she feels certain,almost, that the old woman, Mrs. Netterfield, has gone away.

The piece explores and raises many questions. It suggests thedistinct possibility that Mrs. Netterfield wasn’t somebody to befrightened of at all. It implies in part that Munro’s mother wasslightly paranoid, or a least somewhat grandiose in her telling ofthe story. It also reveals an intense bond between mother andchild, between this specific mother and child, that is carried onthroughout the book and throughout Munro’s work. Only here it ispresented with such depth, forgiveness, understanding, and un-sparing clarity of vision that it takes one’s breath away. It makesyou want to hold on to this book for dear life, and it makes youunderstand why for so many readers Alice Munro is our hero.

"fiction in review: alice munro," jane mendelsohn

Documents