Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

in
Who
as an instance of this, and maintained that “in
The Progress of Love
, the focus has changed. The characters in these 11 stories are concerned not so much with the journey as with the journey’s hidden meaning – how to view the journey, how to make sense of it.” Tyler also notes Munro’s method in “Miles City, Montana,” but she praises Munro’s handling of Steve Gauley’s drowning, “the juxtaposed event … dealt out to the reader so artfully.” Holding the anger the narrator felt years ago – stemming from Gauley’s funeral and focused on all adults, including her parents, though excluding the boy’s father – until the story’s end after her own child’s near drowning, Munro achieves much more: “This narrative restraint sets up a tension beyond anything the plot alone could evoke. We’re pulled along not just by What happened? But also by Why did she feel that way? And What is the significance?” Tyler then examines “The Progress of Love,” “which may be the richest in the collection,” to demonstrate just what she means.
    This same sort of considered analysis characterized the best of the British reviews. Claire Tomalin, in the
Observer
(she had also reviewed
Lives
there), offers a detailed perspective on Munro and her work.Reviewing the ending of “Walker Brothers Cowboy,” Tomalin commented that as Munro “has grown older, her power to unravel a whole tangle of family history has grown stronger and surer, and this latest collection her best yet. Munro is as much a regional writer as Walter Scott or Mauriac, which is to say she broods closely over her chosen territory, discovering richness in what many would be tempted to dismiss as dull and barren.” Like most critics, Tomalin singles out the title story asserting that “when critics call Munro Proustian (as they do) they may be pointing to this virtuoso grasp of a time-span as well as her skill in deploying single physical details – a scrap of wallpaper, a blurred snapshot – as emblems of feeling.” Munro, Tomalin concluded, “is never going to write a blockbuster, thank goodness. Read not more than one of her stories a day, and allow them to work their spell slowly: they are made to last.”
    Also taking a long view was Patricia Craig in the
Sunday Times
. Craig began by quoting from “An Ounce of Cure” from
Dance
and also by applying Munro’s words to “Material” and “The Ottawa Valley” in
Something:
“The snapshot method, in the hands of an author like Alice Munro, is among the subtlest and most illuminating of techniques.” Describing the new collection and seeing it as a more complex extension of what Munro has already done, Craig concluded: “Alice Munro’s imagination is set going by the particulars of local life – gossip, reminiscence, family landmarks. There’s a phrase in the current collection which describes the concerns of all of them: ‘the stories, and griefs, the old puzzles you can’t resist or solve.’ ” In the
Times Literary Supplement
, Anne Duchêne reflected on Munro’s still-growing reputation in Great Britain: “No newcomer, then; yet this accomplished writer – so serious, careful and full of sardonic good humour – remains curiously under-celebrated.” 27
    Beyond reviews, there were numerous other signs of the large success of
The Progress of Love
. It was named the main selection for November by the Book-of-the-Month Club in Canada (Mordecai Richler wrote its description for club members) and, in the United States, Knopf was giving it a quite visible push: they ran a three-column ad placed next to the table of contents in the October 19
New York Times
Book Review
and also advertised in the
New Yorker
. Munro’s U.S. publicity tour the next week attracted considerable media attention and, in December,
The Progress of Love
was selected by the
New York Times
as one of the best works of fiction for 1986 (books by Margaret Atwood, John le Carré, and John Updike were also chosen). McClelland & Stewart went through another printing after the initial run proved insufficient; by the spring they were reporting sales (and royalties) to Munro based on 19,690 copies sold (its total sales in Canada, including the book club, would be almost 32,000). By then, too, the book was announced as being a finalist for the 1986 Governor General’s Award for fiction. Among the other finalists, ironically, was John Metcalf’s
Adult Entertainment
. But
Progress
won; Munro received