Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

“the lives of ordinary people in ordinary places with extra-ordinary interest.” In an extended and thorough reading, Philip Marchand in the
Toronto Star
asked parenthetically while discussing Munro’s description of kitchen walls, “Is there another contemporary writer who has dwelt, in her fiction, so lovingly on trim?” He might have also said wallpaper, or types of cloth, or the appearance of dishes on a counter, or a multitude of other things. He then continued to assert quite correctly that in Munro’s fiction “people remain the same fools they always were.”
    Like Marchand, reviewers of
Friend of My Youth
were keen to refer to some of Munro’s earlier work as a way into the present book. Mary Jo Salter’s offering in the
New Republic
began with a detailed reading of “Accident” from
Moons
, which concludes with Frances’s realization that “people don’t matter, [they] are not terribly distinctive or important; and we all end up,” like the two characters who die in the story, “in a casket.” Salter wrote that “what moves and unnerves me each time I look at ‘Accident’ is the simultaneous impression Munro gives that we are both irreplaceable and dispensable.” Moving from “Accident” to “Miles City, Montana,” Salter referred to the narrator’s dismissal of her former husband Andrew as a “single-sentence, lacerating paragraph.” Moving finally into the new book, she noted that Munro is a writer who “respects our intelligence, our right to sift on our own the cruel world she shows us.… Cruel and bizarre things do happen in this book,” and there’s “a tonal harshness, too, which we welcome.”
    The balanced thoroughness of Salter’s review of
Friend of My Youth
is most evident when she takes up the question of authorial range:
    Nearly every major character in this book, as in Munro’s others, is a woman; most are adulterers; most are seen over a span of some years; most are perceptive and articulate about their own longings and failings; and every story but ‘Friend of My Youth’ is recounted in the third person. Such a clustering of similarities is often the sign of a limited writer, and probably an autobiographical writer (not necessarily, of course, the same thing).
    Yet although Munro strikes me as exactly the sort of person I would care to know, I don’t at all have the feeling that I do. Like the machinery of her sentences, she is in some important way admirably invisible. Munro writes of certain attributes – selfishness or carelessness, for example – with the authority of one who has ‘been there’; but she is remarkably selfless in her presentation of material that may, in this way or that, be autobiographical. And given other similarities among her stories – their rueful but not lugubrious tone, the acute sense her characters suffer of the ineffability of life’s lessons – the mutations Munro achieves in characterization and plotting are even more impressive. Finally, though, it is the largeness of Munro’s wisdom that confirms her range.
    Robert Towers in the
New York Review of Books
also treated
Friend
at some length and on an elevated plane: taking the book up with William Trevor’s
Family Sins and Other Stories
, he likened Munro’s work to Hardy’s and asserted that she is an expert at what James called foreshortening – “the art of creating an illusion of depth by bringing certain details forward for emphasis while allowing others to recede into the background.” The title story is a fine example of Munro’s use of this technique.
    Among the British reviews, Patricia Craig’s in the
Times Literary Supplement
also pointed sharply at particularly effective techniques. Munro is “a specialist in odd-angled observation, telling detail, and the striking ways in which past and present slot into one another.”
Friend
“testifies to the supreme effectiveness of her search for connections – betweenone generation and its predecessors, between different modes of behaviour, or just between one thing and another.” She cited the beginning of “Pictures of the Ice” as an example of Munro’s audacity, of her invention. There we learn of Austin’s death in the first sentence, “Arresting, astringent, deft, idiosyncratic … you can’t avoid these adjectives while trying to characterize her work.”
    Along with Salter’s, Carol Shields’s review of
Friend
in the
London Review of Books
stands out as one that brings a long