Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

in
Quill & Quire
that the “collection is clearly a point of transition for Munro, and is somewhat uneven for that.” Munro does strike chords reminiscent of her earlier work, and “the strengths of her earlier style” are merged “with her newer concerns” in “The Found Boat” and “Material.” Even so, there are places “where the new direction has not yet reached the poise and subtlety of Munro at her best.” And given Munro’s own reaction on hearing that one of her stories had been sold to
McCall’s
, Kildare Dobbs in
Saturday Night
ironically observed that a “friend once complained to me that Alice Munro’s stories were dangerously close to the style of the fiction in women’s magazines.” Dobbs concedes that similarities are real, but sides ultimately with Munro’s own view, “There are far too many troubling undertones in her prose to make it suitablefor slick women’s magazines.” Highlighting Munro’s new direction in his review’s title, Dobbs concludes, “It may well be that stories like ‘Tell Me Yes or No’ are pointers in this new direction. Alice Munro has it in her to become one of the best story tellers now writing.” Reviewing the book in the Canadian edition of
Time
under the title “Moving Miniaturist,” Geoffrey James asserts that Munro often “achieves a kind of subcutaneous empathy with her subjects. The revelations she provides may be small ones, but they are no less moving for that.” Referring to Munro’s earlier work, James celebrated this collection’s wider range with another ironic allusion to another publication: “As any constant reader of
The New Yorker
can attest, the childhood reminiscence has a certain limited fascination. Now, in her third book, Munro shows welcome signs of growth, though half a dozen stories still retain their rural, childhood roots. Some of these are not much more than intensely experienced, vividly recollected incidents, skilled acts of ventriloquism.” And the stories set in cities are “more pointed and more ambiguous than her rural pieces,” he asserted, and he illustrated this by citing “Material.”
    Two things about the Canadian reviews of
Something
are worth noting. By the time Munro’s third book appeared, the consensus on the quality of her work in the short newspaper reviews, those by and large in regional papers, was well established. This sense was shared in magazines as well. There is a homogeneous quality to the reception the book received, quite positive overall with the occasional idiosyncratic comment or objection, such as Dorothy Powell’s order in the
Canadian Author and Bookman
, “Buy this book. Don’t borrow it. It is worth reading and re-reading.” The summaries and analyses echo the sense of Munro’s work already seen, and they are written with confidence that Munro has ascended to the level of established Canadian writer – that is, she has joined the pantheon of “real writers.” Thus Hilda Kirkwood, a longtime reviewer at the
Canadian Forum
, ends her review with a curious paragraph, one indicative of the times: “No doubt these stories will be grist for the Canadian Literature mills. But perhaps we could stop bleating about Canadian Women Writers and admit that these stories are literature and as such are of lasting interest anywhere, aside from the factthat the ladies they are ‘about’ live in Vancouver, Wiarton or Ottawa.”
    Kirkwood’s comment leads directly to the second notable aspect of the reception of
Something
in Canada: with it, discussion of Munro’s work by academics seemed to begin in earnest. The first academic article, by Hallvard Dahlie of the University of Calgary, had appeared in 1972, and the reviews of
Something
followed suit in that they were more numerous and more emphatic than they had been for either of Munro’s first two books. Without question, this academic attention both recognized and advanced Munro’s reputation since it brings additional authority to the judgements being offered. Although reviewing the book in the
London Free Press
, Struthers, then a graduate student at Western, adopted a professorial air and asserts at the beginning of his review that Munro’s “achievement has been partially misunderstood and therefore underrated.” Her real interest, he tells his reader, is in “ordering”: “This awareness of how we all constantly order and re-create the lives of others and ourselves is what is most exciting about the fiction of