Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

the character is peering deep into the river seeking greater clarity, understanding. For Roth, this is such a moment imagined: “A hopeful sign.” Or, as Munro phrased it in “Circle of Prayer,” “What are those times that stand out, clear patches in your life – what do they have to do with it? They aren’t exactly promises. Breathing spaces. Is that all?” In both stories, but especially in “Meneseteung” and in ways new to her work, she was pushing deeper, deeper in time, and deeper into the accumulated detail of history, of her own cultural inheritance: “just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.” 31

    With
Friend of My Youth
Munro finally renounced book tours for good. Informing his colleagues at McClelland & Stewart of her resolve, Gibson wrote that she “sturdily repeats her refusal to tour to promote this book,” but she had agreed to do four or five engagements “that will be of greatest benefit to the book.” He reminded them that “despite being a reluctant promoter, [Munro] is a very good interviewee, and an excellent reader.” In making publicity plans, he continued, they needed to accommodate her schedule since she planned to spend the first three months of 1990 living in Melrose, Scotland, just south of Edinburgh. She had visited there before, but this time she wanted a longer stay at a time “when it wouldn’t be so touristy,” she explained to a reporter, “to get a chance to know the place, settle down in it a bit.” Late in March she flew to Boston for a reading and the Knopf launch. She followed upwith appearances in Seattle, San Francisco, and New York. In Canada, the strategy was to have some of the events in the spring near to the book’s publication. Thus Munro read at Harbourfront on May 3 with Irving Layton, W.O. Mitchell, Al Purdy, and Veronica Tennant. During the crucial fall season, she read at a similar event to encourage sales.
    Gibson and Munro agreed on another realist cover image, Mary Pratt’s
Wedding Dress
, for the book’s dust jacket. He had to scramble a bit to secure it, since it had been promised to Magdalene Redekop, who had written a critical study on Alice Munro. Generously, Redekop was more than willing to forfeit her claim in favour of Munro. Having secured book-club orders of 13,000 copies, McClelland & Stewart had over 36,000 copies printed.
Friend of My Youth
was published in late March in the United States and April 21 in Canada. Though of different sizes, both were set and printed in the United States. Chatto & Windus brought out the British edition on October 15. Sales in Canada were immediately strong; indeed, on June 6 Gibson reported to an editor at Chatto & Windus that, including book clubs, they had sold almost 27,000 copies; ultimately sales in Canada settled at about 34,000 copies. 32
    By this point promotional efforts aided sales but were not driving them. McClelland & Stewart’s initial ad in the
Globe and Mail
quoted from Bharati Mukherjee’s front-page review from the March 18
New York Times Books Review:
“I want to list every story in this collection as my favorite.” They might also have quoted her assertion that Munro is “fast becoming – like Raymond Carver – one of the world’s great totemic writers, able to excite recognition even among readers who grew up in times and societies very different from hers.” Each of Munro’s stories, Mukherjee also wrote, “is a marvel of construction, containing within it parallel narratives of inquiry and retrospection.” Malcolm Jones, Jr., the reviewer in
Newsweek
, observed that it is easy “to make Alice Munro’s stories sound as interesting as a trip to the dentist,” but what they are about misses the point. They are “quiet, complicated, revealing themselves” slowly. Munro herself is “wickedly funny,” and her sentences “are always perfectly cadenced, and almostepigrammatically beautiful.” She is a “rarity, an author unafraid to write about people as intelligent as she is” – these people, like their creator, are truly interested in “the interior, speculative life.”
    In each country the reviews are characterized by a ready acknowledgement of Munro’s accomplishment and genius, but this sense as usual was most pointed in Canada. William French revisited Hugh Garner’s foreword to
Dance
in order to say that what Garner saw then is emphatically still true in Munro’s stories: she continues to endow