Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

possess both the pain and immediacy of life and the clear, hard radiance of art.” Paul Gray, in
Time
, began his notice by asserting that Munro “continues to buck the genre’s fashionable trend toward miniaturization and microplots. Her characters stubbornly refuse to trudge through brief but nonetheless tedious interludes.” Gray was one of a number of careful, thoughtful reviewers who sought to get at just why Munro’s stories have the effects they have, why her vision is both different, and better, from that of other writers. Citing “White Dump” as an example, Gray wrote that “the major event” in the story’s action, “the decision years earlier of the first wife to run away, evolves almost glancingly into a stunning finale.”
    Following this same line, two reviews of
Progress
by other writers are among the sharpest, most considered, and persuasive. Joyce Carol Oates, writing in the
New York Times Book Review
, began by comparing Munro to Peter Taylor, William Trevor, and Edna O’Brien and holds that, like them, she “writes stories that have the density – moral,emotional, sometimes historical – of other writers’ novels.” Oates got to the heart of just what Munro has been working toward throughout her entire career:
    As remote from the techniques and ambitions of what is currently known as “minimalist” fiction as it is possible to get and still inhabit the same genre, these writers give us fictitious worlds that are mimetic paradigms of utterly real worlds yet are fictions, composed with so assured an art that it might be mistaken for artlessness. They give voice to the voices of their regions, filtering the natural rhythms of speech through a more refined (but not obtrusively refined) writerly speech. They are faithful to the contours of local legend, tall tales, anecdotes, family reminiscences; their material is nearly always realistic – “Realism” being that convention among competing others that swept all before it in the mid and late 19th century – and their characters behave, generally, like real people. That is, they surprise us at every turn, without violating probability. They so resemble ourselves that reading about them, at times, is emotionally risky. Esthetically experimental literature, while evoking our admiration, rarely moves us in the way this sort of literature moves us.
    Oates placed Munro’s writing generally, and
Progress
specifically, in this intellectual and aesthetic context. She “has concentrated on short fiction that explores the lives of fairly undistinguished men and women – but particularly women – who live in rural Ontario.… The most powerful of the 11 stories collected in ‘The Progress of Love’ take on bluntly and without sentiment the themes of mortality, self-delusion, puzzlement over the inexplicable ways of fate.” Oates cited “A Queer Streak,” “White Dump,” and especially “The Progress of Love” as the volume’s strongest stories but, sharp critic that she is, also argued that more than the two collections preceding it,
The Progress of Love
“does contain less fully realized stories.” She cites “Eskimo” as one that “reads like an early draft of a typically rich, layered, provocative Munro story,” and sees the two parts of “Miles City, Montana” asinsufficiently integrated, connected by their “rather forced epiphany.” But even the weaker stories offer “passages of genuinely inspired prose and yield the solid pleasures of a three-dimensional world that has been respectfully, if not always lovingly, recorded.” Thematically, Oates summarizes
The Progress of Love
as “a volume of unflinching honesty, uncompromising in its dissection of the ways we deceive ourselves in the name of love; the bleakness of its vision is enriched by the author’s exquisite eye and ear for detail. Life is heartbreak, but it is also uncharted moments of kindness and reconciliation.”
    Novelist Anne Tyler, writing in the
New Republic
, offered another thorough and resonant assessment. “Once in these stories,” she wrote, “you really are inside them; you have a vivid sense of the world that’s being described.” Tyler also sought to place
The Progress of Love
within the context of Munro’s evolving art: “The characters in the earlier collections were traveling along the distinct, deeply grooved tracks of their life stories, and it was the tracks themselves that provided the focus.” She cited Rose’s story