Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

the
Ottawa Journal
Claire Harrison wrote that “these stories are stripped of the romanticism thatcharacterized Munro’s earlier works. They display control and polish along with a gripping sense of immediacy – an outstanding collection by one of Canada’s outstanding writers.” Tim Struthers in the
London Free Press
saw
Who
as “much more complex and mature than Munro’s
Lives of Girls and Women
(1971), despite a superficial resemblance between the two books.” “Simon’s Luck,” he added, is “possibly Munro’s most overpowering story to date.” 37
    There is a sense that the reviewers of
Who
felt the heft of Munro’s work as a body. Summary comments strove to offer deeper and more literary judgements. In
Maclean’s
, Mark Abley wrote, “The humor in Alice Munro’s new collection of fiction has a trenchant, bittersweet edge. Good times don’t last long. Love is always tangled up with competing emotions: loneliness, pity, lust. Fun is usually had at the expense of somebody else. Munro is a master of mixed feelings.”
Who
“is deeper, wiser, more plaintive”; its very title proclaims that “even the fact of identity must be probed, tested, thought over.” In her work “nothing, including the truth, can make us free. The only triumph is the blessing of understanding, a mixed blessing, like them all.” Describing the author herself, Brian Bartlett in the Montreal
Gazette
saw
Who
as “further proof of her lavish talent, but it also raises questions about a severity in her vision.” Citing what he calls her “fierce humor,” he points out a description of the student who “attacks Rose” at a party “with obscene insults: ‘He was white and brittle-looking, desperately drunk. He had probably been brought up in a gentle home, where people talked about answering Nature’s call and blessed each other for sneezing.’ The brilliant sharpness of that sarcasm has seldom been seen in Munro.” Linda Leitch, in the University of Guelph
Ontarian
, offered an encompassing assessment that still holds; she notes “a deliberation and calculation … that is often overlooked in the critical praise of her particular brand of kitchen-sink realism. Beneath the deceptive simplicity of her immensely readable prose lie the marks of a conscientious craftsman; beyond the astonishing precision of detail with which Munro presents the ‘true lies’ of her fiction is a vision and scope that transcends regionalism, feminism and nationalism.” Recalling thatMunro won a Governor General’s Award for
Dance
, Leitch concluded: “I think there’s little doubt that she’ll be receiving another.” Writing in the Newfoundland
Evening Telegram
, Helen Porter maintained that Munro “is at least as unsparing of her leading character as she is anyone else in the book.” Noting the growth of Munro’s reputation in the United States, Porter asserted that “Alice Munro is one of the best writers of fiction in the world.”
    There were a few dissenters. Some reviewers found West Hanratty to be an unattractive place populated by grotesque characters. Writing in the annual “Letters in Canada” feature of the
University of Toronto Quarterly
, Sam Solecki placed the book in the context of “feminist fiction of the last two decades” but regretted Munro’s “failure to go much beyond what she had already achieved in that mode in
Lives of Girls and Women
and in her earlier stories.” He took issue with Munro’s characterization of Rose’s husband, Patrick Blatchford, and related this to a “failure to create fully realized central characters – and her emphasis has always been on character above all other aspects of the story – [which] prevents the book from [being] a worthy successor to
Lives of Girls and Women.”
    Reviews of
Who
are also characterized by comments on specific stylistic matters. Gerald Noonan in the
Canadian Book Review Annual
takes up Munro’s “most flamboyant phrasing,” what he calls “the excrement vision in winter,” pointing to an image in “Privilege” where the reader finds “framed by the hole of the outdoor toilet; the residual deposits lie glazed with ice, ‘preserved as if under glass, bright as mustard or grimy as charcoal.’ ” Gordon Powers in the
Ottawa Revue
notes that most of the stories in
Who
have appeared in U.S. magazines “and a number of Munro’s fans have found this worrisome, as if there is something unseemly about fiction in publications with a