Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

before, Munro is a social historian, thinking nothing of placing three generations in a tale and removing, like tissued layers, the deep strata in people’s lives. Old houses, like relationships, are sky-lighted or ruined, and underlying every story is a bedrock of stubbornness, a dark lump in the gut, which Munro circles calmly, giving us all we might know while saying it’s never enough.” Most major Canadian papers offered their assessments on the day
Progress
was published. Robert Stewart, in the
Montreal Gazette
, oddly condescends to the small towns of southern Ontario, calling Munro’sterritory a “sterile landscape.” But when he asks rhetorically why a reader should care about Munro’s “buttoned-up” WASPS , he answered his question with another: “Who cared about the drab existence of the Russian serfs in the works of Chekhov and Turgenev?” In the
Globe and Mail
, William French savoured the book, noting that Munro – with the exception of “Eskimo,” a story seen by many as below her usual standard – stays in her familiar territory, Huron County, Ontario. He also notes her “dextrous handling of time.… Munro has become even more adept at intercutting past, present, and future.” As had been the case before among Canadian newspaper reviews, the single best one was David Williamson’s in the
Winnipeg Free Press
. He cited a passage from the American writer Kay Boyle, “a short story should ‘invest a brief sequence of events with reverberating human significance by means of style, selection and ordering of detail,’ ” and agreed with her too that a story should be “at once a parable and a slice of life, at once symbolic and real.” Addressing this conception, Williamson compared Munro to other short story luminaries like Donald Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Peter Taylor, and sounded a note that became a frequent clarion call for
Progress:
that Munro’s stories seem more like “compressed novels.”
Progress
is Munro’s “best work yet,” he concluded.
    Munro’s handling of time comes in for especial attention, with Heather Henderson in
Maclean’s
concluding that in her work “the past is not a better place – but is a part of everyone, demanding acknowledgement.” Even though there is evidence of the beginning of another angle of criticism of her work – one reviewer refers to her somewhat snidely as “the darling of Canadian literature” and a CBC panel of literary types discussing the book on
Morningside
, ignoring her innovative treatment of time, complained that Munro was not doing anything new – the Canadian reviews of
Progress
are largely summarized by Audrey Andrews’s assertion in the
Calgary Herald:
“Munro lifts out the essence of reality. That is her art. Reading her work, we recognize ourselves.” 26
    If Canadian reviewers, who had been responding to Munro’s books for almost twenty years, were by now understandably reaching for other ways to assess her work (“of course her stories are brilliant, but …”), reviewers in the United States and Britain were just hittingtheir stride with
Progress
. The
Publishers Weekly
advance review on July 4 set the tone: Munro “brings to each story a freshness of vision, a breadth of sympathy and a wide-ranging imagination that makes her work both unpredictable and scrupulously true.… One senses Munro’s conviction that human nature is mysterious and wonderful. Her stories are magically captivating. They will stand the test of time.” Slopen’s
Publishers Weekly
profile appeared in August. She asserted of Munro that “few people writing today can bring a character, a mood or a scene to life with such economy. And she has an exhilarating ability to make the reader see the familiar and ordinary with fresh insight and compassion.” Slopen also quoted Munro on her preferred form: “I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that’s the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don’t understand. The novel has to have a coherence which I don’t see any more in the lives around me.”
    Michiko Kakutani, in the
New York Times
, offered this conclusion: “Drawing upon her seemingly infinite reserves of sympathy,” Munro offers “pictures of life, of relationships, of love, glimpsed from a succession of mirrors and frames – pictures that