Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Alice Munro.” David Stouck of Simon Fraser University, writing in the
West Coast Review
, focused on Munro’s style, “where the sentences are each carefully crafted, polished units and their effects carefully weighed and balanced. Like Flaubert, her prose has the authority of finished product, painstakingly executed and flawless in design.” Also focusing on Munro’s style, E.D. Blodgett (of the University of Alberta, a scholar who went on to write an important critical overview) wrote that “some poets – Rilke, Keats – fear to utter the most beautiful line. Munro, however, has created a style in which revelation would be a kind of cover-up.” He also wrote that “the story dwells and lives darkly and erratically within the narrator. It is
her
story, and not
about
her.” 27
    Such academic reviews were not so much validation of Munro’s writing as they were an important next step in her growing reputation. All three reviewers were at pains to assert the complexity of Munro’s work, and the latter two proposed lofty figures for comparison. Kirkwood’s final paragraph suggests, too, that this was happening just at the time when English-Canadian nationalism, which held sway among intellectuals and, most especially, in the universities, was fostering Canadian literature as a field of academic study. Kirkwood, notan academic herself, also reflects Munro’s status after
Lives
as a writer whose work was seen in an especial Canadian feminist context. Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, and Munro formed a trinity of Canadian women writers. (During the 1970s academics in Canadian literature began to joke about “the three Margarets”: Laurence, Atwood, and Alice Munro.)
    But that was in Canada. When
Something
was published by McGraw-Hill in fall 1974, discussions of prior reputation and the development of Canadian literature were muted. Overall, the book got positive reviews in the United States. Three of the more considered ones, though, each a review appearing in major newspapers, were acerbic, even caustic. Bette Howland begins her review in the
Chicago Tribune
noting the praise and award Munro got for her first books, and continuing, “That’s gratifying; she’s talented and well worth the attention.” But
Something
“is not so good as her earlier work; the stories are less than the talent they display. ‘This is a message; I really believe it is,’ she writes at the end of one, ‘but I don’t see how I can deliver it.’ She might have been reviewing her own book.” Howland sees two types of stories here. First, what she calls “ ‘good ideas for a short story’ – well made, carefully plotted, essentially contrived, and lacking in feeling.” These are the stories Munro got from her earlier attempts. The other “kind of writing is flailing, experimental. The stories have less clearly defined plots, maybe none at all, and come to no conclusions.… Often their subject is the writer’s relation to her material,” and they are filled with disclaimers that emphasize the writer’s position. They “are uttered so often that they become in themselves a ‘trick.’ They mar the ending of ‘Ottawa Valley,’ which contains by far the best and truest writing in the book.” Howland’s review deserves to be noted, for the flaws she saw in
Something
are those Munro came to see there herself, flaws she saw as she was making the book. Although still publishable, she thought, these stories were fundamentally flawed.
    A similar review by Frederick Busch appeared in the
New York Times
. More negative though less considered and not as precisely argued as Howland’s, Busch’s review takes up the narrative reversal in “Tell Me Yes or No” and asserts that these stories “are journeyman’swork. But they are no more than that, and by now – ‘In Our Time’ was published in 1925 – we ought to demand that a volume of stories delivers thrilling economy, the poetry which makes the form so valuable.” Busch sees lots of information here, “but there is little emotional tension arising from the events.” As with Howland, Munro’s revelations about authorship seem to have irritated him. After discussing the ending of “How I Met My Husband,” where the narrator is disingenuous about her reasons for letting her husband tell their courtship story the way he does, the reviewer writes, “That the author can provoke anger by betraying her character is evidence that she can
make
characters. The