Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

‘Dulse’, constantly fabricating explanations which she does not believe herself.” Christopher Wordsworth in the
Financial Guardian
called
Moons
a “wise and impressive collection.” Noting her command of “the art which conceals art,” he pronounced Munro “a writer who can mix with the very highest company.” Summarizing Munro’s career, Isabel Quigly in the
Financial Times
pronounced her a “real writer” and continued,
    Alice Munro has been compared with Proust (also, most unsuitably, with Joyce Carol Oates, Hemingway, and John Cheever), short-listed for the Booker prize and remains (though dazzling) quite unperturbed and unaffected, her writing smooth and supple, reticent in expressing feeling yet filled to the brim with exactly the right emotional quantity; never a false one, so never a jarring emotional note.
    Other reviewers dealt with Munro’s sense of reality. Paul Bailey in the
Standard
noted that reality “is of the essence in Alice Munro’s art – reality of a peculiarly raw kind,” especially in “The Turkey Season.” Bailey calls “Dulse” delicate, and he saw “Chaddeleys and Flemings: 2. The Stone in the Field” as a story “worthy of Willa Cather herself.” Taking up the scene between Janet and her father in the hospital in “The Moons of Jupiter” when she notices the read-out from the heart monitor, Dorothy Porter in the Glasgow
Herald
sees in it an equivalent of “Munro’s technique: she looks almost scientifically at the human heart, and then tactfully withdraws, respecting the essential privacy of the individual.” Finally, John Mellors in the
Listener
began by asserting “Alice Munro, like O’Faolain and Chekhov and, indeed, all the best short-story writers, leaves you with the feeling of having known real people with lives of their own before and after the events described. Nothing seems made up or embroidered.” He also notes that the stories “are all set in Canada, and Munro, while waving no maple leaves, has a strong sense of place and history.”
“Have you thought about what a terrible threat to illiteracy you are?”
    Throughout the reviews of
Moons
, several readers commented that Munro tended, in moments of especial insight, to compose epigrams. Frequently cited was one from “Accident” when Frances describes her correspondence with “old friends from the conservatory”: “They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admitthat what you are living is your life.” For Munro, her thirties were those “bumbling years” when her older daughters were growing up in West Vancouver and the bookstore had been launched in Victoria. There was Andrea’s arrival. Her marriage’s decline. A first book, finally. A nascent reputation. Leaving Victoria, out on her own. London, Metcalf, Western, Fremlin. Clinton. “Real Life.”
    Another moment that attracted reviewers appears in “Hard-Luck Stories,” a story from
Moons
that also used some of the material left over from the extended “Simon’s Luck.” Derived therefore from the story that might reasonably be characterized as Munro’s first real “passion” story, “Hard-Luck Stories,” like “Simon’s Luck” and “Dulse,” meditates on female-male relations. Like them, it captures a moment in a life when the main character, imperceptibly but unmistakably, shifts into another way of seeing. In such a moment there is a sense of groping toward realization that is never completely grasped nor understood. In draft, “Hard-Luck Stories” was at one point called “A Perfect Story.” The passage that attracted special notice was one that described the narrator’s reaction to a surprise touch she received from Douglas, a man she scarcely knows, as they tour a church with another woman:
    I felt that I had been overtaken – stumped by a truth about myself, or at least a fact, that I couldn’t do anything about. A pressure of the hand, with no promise about it, could admonish and comfort me. Something unresolved could become permanent. I could be always bent on knowing, and always in the dark, about what was important to him, and what was not.
    In closing, the narrator envisions the three of them leaving Toronto and running away to Nova Scotia: “Julie and I would work as barmaids. Douglas could set traps for lobsters. Then we could all be happy.”
    One of the British reviewers of
Moons
noticed that ten of its twelve stories look “through the eyes of