Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

pull, less meandering in and out of the past.”
    Though there are many more Canadian reviews than these, fulsome praise was their overall response. Leo Simpson began his review in the
Hamilton Spectator
with an august assertion: “This is probably as good a short story collection as James Joyce’s Dubliners.” Joyce’s book may be the weaker of the two, he continued, noting “relatively lightweight pieces as Araby.” Since no stories in
Moons
are notably weak, “the Munro book seems to me stronger.” However one sees the comparison, this is heady stuff.
    The Joyce-Munro parallel had been well known among critics since the mid-1970s, but Simpson (originally from Ireland himself) was pressing the matter further. Thus not only were Canadian reviewers dissecting their superlatives, they were seeking superlative comparison. Kareda’s review of
Who
made and detailed the comparison with Chekhov. As both these reviews suggest, readers were beginning to see and understand the enduring quality of Munro’s work. Tom Crerar, in his review of
Moons
in
Brick
saw these same qualities in probably the most succinct summary of the book’s effect: “In these stories, no future escapes its past.” He continued, “For the real subject of these stories is not everyday people in everyday places. The real subject is time. Not time in the sense of a chronicle or a history. But time as a condition, a sentence to life.” 14

    As
Moons
was being reviewed and Munro was seeing to her authorial duties across the country, Ann Close was moving the Knopf edition toward its February 28 publication in the United States. Munro had agreed to do publicity for the Knopf edition, including a trip to New York just as
Moons
was published there, and later visits to Boston and Washington. Hoping for usable comments, Close made sure the book went out to a select group of American writers, among them Shirley Hazzard, Alice McDermott, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Tim O’Brien. All responded and Mason, for instance, wrote back to say that she “would have bought it anyway” since Munro is one of her “favorite writers.”Indeed, she had wanted to write her a fan letter for some time. When Munro came to New York, she read at the Y MHA Poetry Center (with Marilyn Robinson) on February 28 and attended a reception for both writers afterwards; the next night, she read with Cynthia Ozick at Books & Company and at another bookstore on March 3. During the New York visit she did interviews, met people (including, finally, Charles McGrath and other
New Yorker
editors), and attended luncheons.
    Meanwhile, the American edition was beginning to gather attention. The advance review in
Publishers Weekly
began, “These painfully honest stories … are as hard, clear and mysterious as a cold winter morning.” Paying particular attention to “Labor Day Dinner,” “The Stone in the Field,” and “The Turkey Season,” it asserted that “this moving, finely written volume leaves the reader facing up to life.” In February the large newspapers began weighing in. Anatole Broyard concentrated on descriptions of characters and actions in his review in the
New York Times
, seeing the situation in “The Turkey Season” as an instance of Munro’s “genius for homely images.” “The Moons of Jupiter” he regarded as “particularly good” and most of the other stories are as intriguing; picking up a description from “Visitors,” Broyard saw the book “filled with squawks, calls, screeches and cries of a human nature.” In the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, Lisa Zeidner commented that Munro’s stories “have the deceptive simplicity of Edward Hopper’s paintings,” and that in them she “records not only grief and longing, but happiness as potent as it is fragile – almost pantheistic moments that pass as quickly as gorgeous dusks.” Among other major papers reviewing
Moons
were the
Boston Globe
and the
Los Angeles Times
while, in the
Miami Herald
, book editor William Robertson observed that “there is nothing flashy about Munro’s writing. It is absolutely precise in observed detail.… An unsentimental view of the heart is what Munro is after and most of the time she finds it.” He concluded: “That’s good for her. But it’s better for us.”
    The reviewer in
Time
, Patricia Blake, wrote that Munro’s stories possess “a melodic line that catches at the heart with its freshness,” and that her “originality is all the more striking because her