Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

then had in each audience’s literary pantheon, but there was almost no variance from the view that her writing is an accomplished delight, work to be savoured. Nuala O’Faolain, writing in the Dublin
Sunday Tribune
in a 1984 review focused on the Penguin paperbacks of
Moons
and
The Beggar Maid
, captures just how
Moons
was received overall. O’Faolain recalls being surprised that Munro’s earlier book was a Booker finalist, but “now I’m amazed that she didn’t win it. Not for years have I come across a writer so congenial. She seems to see how life is and to be serene in her own priorities that she can effortlessly shape experience so as to make it resonate colour in its significances. Not that you feel her shaping hand at work.” Her stories “leave one wondering not how does a person get to write like that, but how does a person get to be like that.” O’Faolain’s review is called “Alice Munro: Soaring Clear,” and the allusion is to Munro’s superiority over Anne Hébert (also under review) and Barbara Pym, a writer of “infinitesimal talent.”
    Canadian reviewers of
Moons
realized that mere superlatives would not do, that they needed to analyze just why Munro’s writing is so affecting. Bharati Mukherjee, in
Quill & Quire
, wrote that Munro’s “lyrical eye is more perceptive and intense than ever, but now it is augmented with psychological density.” In
Books in Canada
, Wayne Grady wrote that Munro’s stories do not offer the “searing vision” he finds in Gallant, but though Munro’s “stories are not intellectual at all … they are full of intelligence and an emotional intensity camouflaged by deliberate naivety.” William French in the
Globe and Mail
wrote that Munro’s “ability to convey nuances and imply the ambiguities inherent in human relationships has never been greater. She can describe a character so deftly in a phrase or two that you know exactly what shemeans.” Munro is, he concluded, “one of the great short-story writers of our time.” At the same time, French wondered if Munro was becoming a “minimalist” since “there’s an occasional hermetic sense of being too closely involved with people who aren’t all that interesting.” Ken Adachi in the
Toronto Star
noted Munro’s “mastery of tone and mood,” and Sam Solecki, writing this time in the
Canadian Forum
rather than an academic review, still found much to be picky about, although he sees that in
Moons
the “only ironies or twists of the plot that interest Munro are those that are inevitable in, and therefore common to most of our lives.” She offers “ordinary lives and mundane events described realistically in everyday diction, imagery, and syntax, yet one leaves the story feeling as if one had just encountered something unusual.” 13
    Urjo Kareda described
Moons
as “a transitional volume: thrilling, mysterious, astonishing.” Munro, he wrote, “seems to be shedding her skin. Half the stories show the author at her most familiarly assured, but there is something unexpected and disruptive in the others. The prose reveals a new edge of tension, as if previously protected nerveends had suddenly been exposed.” Kareda saw Munro making new demands on her readers, writing that her “great achievement is to make us accept our inability to know.” Larry Scanlan in the
Kingston Whig-Standard
saw in Munro’s work what Atwood has called “the complex truth,” and notes her “reliance on the present tense, as if the action were unfolding before our eyes, and we, its witnesses, had only to absorb it.”
    Reviewers in Canada sought to define the essence of Munro’s powerful effects. In a Vancouver paper, Alan Twigg described Munro as “painstakingly perfect” while, in
Western Living
, John Faustman asserted that reading Munro “is an unalloyed pleasure.” A reader can feel her “warmth right through the pages.” Conceding all this and setting it aside, David Williamson again wrote one of the best Canadian reviews of Munro in the
Winnipeg Free Press
. He posed two questions: What makes her stories so good and, second, Are there no flaws? The first answer is longer, and it follows Williamson’s view that her “people are not symbols or props, they are individuals, each and every one of them.” For flaws, he manages a paragraph on the “flatness” of ordinary people as characters and on Huron County as setting, andhe concedes that some “readers may wish for a stronger narrative