Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

having rejected both routine success and the trap of marriage to a boy whose mind is resolutely, even proudly, closed, she will have to find her own path out of Jubilee into the rest of her life.
    Because we cannot but believe Del and Alice Munro to be one and the same, we are assured that she did succeed in doing so. Munro’s style – the quality of her language both in its precision of diction, which reflects her sharpness of observation, and its rhythms, which have the elegance and sense of expressive inevitability of a writer who loves and respects the art of syntax – is the style of a highly developed, mature artist. Despite Munro’s disclaimer, one feels that is what Del becomes.… This short masterpiece of writing is open-ended; we walk out of it, like Del, into the rest of our lives, confirmed and changed. 16
    When
Lives
was published in Britain in fall 1973, the reviews were fewer; they were also shorter, given the British practice of taking up several books in a relatively short space. Julian Symons in the
Sunday Times
remarked that Munro “is one of two interesting new Canadian writers to have come my way recently, the other being Margaret Atwood, whose two remarkable novels are worth looking for.”
Lives
, he maintained, “is a book of much charm and talent, and also one that is distinctly Canadian.” Patrick Anderson in the
Sunday Telegraph
saw Munro as “emerging from the literary ferment which is a feature of contemporary Canada.… [She] is a writer of the greatest distinction – perceptive, amusing, richly detailed as to characters (credibly eccentric) and to place (scruffy farmland and claustrophobically parochial townships).” He saw her characters as representing a wide range of humanity, “all beautifully done.” Ronald Blythe in
The Listener
maintained thatMunro treats an old theme with “distinction”: “Del’s affair with Garnet, the ‘saved’ boy, is a brilliant study of blind love.” Claire Tomalin in
The Observer
also noted Del’s relationship with Garnet as a convincing account “of that sort of short-lived but devastating obsession” and concludes, “There is not a dull or a false note in the book, which achieves exactly what it attempts.” Summing the book up in the
New Statesman
, Marigold Johnson wrote, “Episodic and sometimes repetitive as this scrapbook of anecdotes appears, this is much more than local nostalgia – and much funnier, especially on the women’s liberation front.” When the Women’s Press brought out a paperback edition of
Lives
in 1978, Patricia Beer in the
Times Literary Supplement
called
Lives
“an honest book” and went on to write that one “of the few criticisms that can be made of the book is that it often explains too much. The writing is in fact good enough to rely much more on implication than it allows itself to do.” 17
    When
Dance of the Happy Shades
was published by McGraw-Hill New York in the fall and the next spring by Allen Lane in Britain, its reviews seem anticlimactic; yet, written as they were well after the book’s first publication and after
Lives
, some of them also show Munro’s growing reputation, while others notice elements not much remarked on previously. In this latter vein, Allison Engel, writing in the
Des Moines Register
, notes that Munro “manages to look backward without attaching adult significances to the events she recalls.” A short notice in the
New York Times
mistitled the book “Dance of the Happy Hours” (the paper ran a correction); it summarized the stories and concluded that Munro “poses more questions than answers – a refreshing strategy.” In the Nashville
Tennessean
Francis Neel Cheney put his finger on a salient connection, beginning “Not since I read Eudora Welty’s ‘A Worn Path’ have I been as moved, as impressed, as I have by these fifteen stories, most of them set in Jubilee, patterned on Wingham, a small town in Western Ontario, where the author grew up, and which she knows so well. As she knew all its people.” The anonymous review in the
New Yorker
praises the vivid strength of Munro’s description but “personality and character” show her hand “weak and her work faint.” Martha Byrd in the
Kingsport Times-News
(Tennessee) writes that Munro “has a knack for looking at ordinary people in ordinarysituations and distilling the bonds that unite us as human beings. She paints vivid pictures without an excess of words; she draws distinct characters with