Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

subject is ordinariness.” Noting “Accident” and “Bardon Bus” particularly, Blake alsointroduced the Chekhov comparison, concluding that writing “about ordinary life is hazardous; it may induce the boredom that is its subject. Munro defies the danger, and triumphs.” Gardner McFall, the reviewer in
Newsday
, called
Moons
“dazzling” and asserted that Munro “writes with such acuity that description becomes perception” – he pointed to the gift of seaweed at the end of “Dulse,” calling it a crystallization of such a moment. Taking up the opening paragraph of the first story, “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 1. Connection,” Ann Hulbert in the
New Republic
focused on Munro’s style: “With a sure rhythmic sense, she builds from the clipped first sentences to the long last sentence, its clauses as firmly balanced as the ladies themselves. Her words, too, are carefully weighed, yet her tone throughout is disarmingly colloquial. Boldly drawn, Munro’s stories are like busy scenes in a larger novelistic landscape.” Despite such consensus, there was the odd negative response. Arthur Evenchik in the Baltimore
Sun
was looking for “a greater store of discoveries – an enlightened perception of character and place, which Alice Munro cannot afford to have momentarily lost.” Putting it in perspective, he sees “a new doubtfulness in this book, a loss of incisiveness and spirit, that causes most of the stories to fall below her usual standard.”
    On March 20 the
New York Times Book Review
ran its notice of
Moons
on the front page. There Benjamin DeMott saw
Moons
as stronger than
The Beggar Maid
, calling it “witty, subtle, passionate.… It’s exceptionally knowledgeable about the content and movement – the entanglements and entailments – of individual human feeling. And the knowledge it offers can’t be looked up elsewhere.” Munro’s “sense of style and craft is impeccable,” and she is especially impressive “when she takes us inside the experience of letting go – accepting the end of a human connection.” When she does this, DeMott wrote in a line that is impressively accurate, Munro is “seldom sentimental yet never mean.” Others made the same point: few writers at work today, David Lehman wrote in
Newsweek
, “can move us as deeply as Alice Munro.”
Moons
“is a triumph of sentiment over sentimentality.” Gail Cooper in the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
noted that the “deftness and accuracy of her portrayal of characters is founded … on sensitivity tothe nuances, the strangeness of life. A seemingly atypical or inconsequential event will adumbrate a life’s significance.” Cooper also paid close attention to Munro’s use of point of view in “The Turkey Season” and in “Mrs. Cross and Mrs. Kidd”: “their lives are an extrapolation of the girls they once were.” 15
    Late in April 1983 the reviews of
Moons
in England began to appear and, as was to continue to be the norm, the British notices tended to remark on different things in the book. Nina Bawsen in the
Daily Telegraph
wrote that Munro’s stories are distinguished not “by resignation but a wise and perceptive acceptance” of the way life is. In
City Limits
, Gillian Allnutt saw Munro’s writing as “matter-of-fact, almost laconic,” writing that seems poetic: “in its choice of detail, of incident and conversation, the suggestive juxtapositions, the often surprising ending, that give these stories their power. So much is left to silence that each story, once settled in the imagination, begins to grow into a novel.” Writing in
The Observer
, Peter Kemp saw Munro’s strength in her ability to establish “the characters’ inner and outer lives – and the connections between them – these are sparely written, richly resonant pieces.” Kemp reviewed
Moons
alongside William Trevor’s
Fools of Fortune
, and he treated them as equals despite Trevor’s larger reputation. Reviewing Munro a second time, Alan Hollinghurst in the
Times Literary Supplement
saw “a deep ambiguity about this book – though one felt on the pulses rather than in an intellectually playful way: her writing has a penetrating concision, at once watchfully spare and lyrically intense, which contradicts or refuses the too facile satisfaction of accounting for everything.” Illustrating this significant point, Hollinghurst wrote that Munro “seems fastidiously to question the very trust she inspires, like Lydia in the story