Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

provided.Acknowledging the books he sent and the help he offered in his first letter to her, Close commented that Munro “seems very happy with the success of the book in Canada. I only hope we can do as well for her next fall.” 35

    Who Do You Think You Are?
was certainly doing
very
well in Canada. In a talk he gave to Macmillan’s sales people as
Who
was imminent, Gibson maintained that “every Canadian critic asked to name Canada’s best writers invariably includes Alice Munro on the list.” He concluded that “this is a very, very big book – we’re lucky to have it, and we’re going to see it high on the best-seller list.” The book’s reviews verified this prediction. They were quite positive overall, and sales were brisk; the initial printing of 8,500 copies was exhausted by early January so Macmillan arranged a second one of 2,500.
Who
was initially announced at $9.95 but, just after Munro’s changes were made and the book was back in production, Macmillan hedged its bet and raised the price to $10.95.
    For her part, Munro embarked on a cross-country tour that took her to Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, and Ottawa by the end of the month. She also visited one or two other smaller Ontario cities. Gibson reported to Close, “Even her shyness about promoting the books seems to be wearing off.” Munro had specifically asked not to do readings or bookstore signings, limiting herself to interviews. Always one to husband her energies, Munro did no more than four a day. Arranging this schedule, she avoided Victoria altogether, although she did break the tour while in British Columbia to visit with Andrea and friends. At her suggestion, this publicity tour emphasized her involvement in the anti-censorship dispute. As Gibson wrote to his colleagues when the publicity for
Who
was being planned, “In the course of promoting this book, she would be glad to become a spokesman for the anti-censorship forces.” They would, of course, “want to carefully consider the implications of identifying Alice and this book with the cause of anti-censorship.” 36
    The first reviews appeared in October. Two of these – in
Books in Canada
and
Quill & Quire
– were based on the advance proof of the “Rose and Janet” version of the book. In the former, Wayne Grady noted that, compared to Munro’s earlier work, she “still works the same raw material, but she writes now in a minor, sadder key, and the result is a novel of literary as well as nostalgic value.” After he describes Rose and Janet, he writes that “there is a peculiar two-way mirror effect at the end of the book, a faint Nabokian twist, when a Dalgleish woman asks Janet: ‘That Rose you write about. Is she supposed to be you?’ ” The reviewer in
Quill & Quire
wished that Munro would “expand her horizons” by taking up different material and moving “on to somewhere else.” The Janet stories “are not, on the whole, as engaging as the Rose collection,” a small confirmation of Munro’s decision to rearrange the book.
    Widely reported, Munro’s changes were mentioned in passing but most reviewers focused on the book itself. William French in the
Globe and Mail
observes that some of these individual stories, appearing as they did “isolated and out of context” in magazines, “raised doubts about where [Munro] was going, after the great artistic success of her first three books. They seemed to lack the cohesion and vision of her earlier work.” The book, however, makes clear that “there was no need to worry”: “arranged in chronological order,” the stories “come together beautifully, with unexpected unity.” This book “is stamped with the same seal of quality as Munro’s earlier books.” There is, he added, no other “contemporary Canadian writer as good as Munro in conveying the mood and texture of Ontario’s small towns in the three decades to the end of the fifties.” Gina Mallet in the
Toronto Star
focuses on the payphone windfall in “Providence,” writing that “the lucky strike briefly releases” Rose, who “ ‘wasn’t at the mercy of past or future, or love, or anybody.’ ” In the stories Munro “continually surprises. The drifting nostalgia, the exquisitely turned phrases do not produce a jeweled façade, they are inextricably part of a commentary on a rough, crude, earthy evocation of Ontario. It’s like seeing a perfectly manicured hand with mud under the fingernails.” In