Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

perspective to the task. More than that, Shields writes with the perspective of one who has attempted, and succeeded at, much the same art as has Munro herself. In her case too, she writes with real knowledge of Munro as a person. The two had met in the 1970s and, though Shields was only a few years younger, her fiction is usually seen as coming after, and being influenced by, Munro’s. Recalling her first reading of Shields’s
Small Ceremonies
, Munro commented, “You just get that shiver when you come across a real writer, and I had that with [this book].” Throughout, Munro was supportive of Shields’s work and career, writing references for her and providing quotations about her work. When Shields died after a long illness, Munro was among those quoted.
    Not surprisingly, in her review of
Friend
Shields offered a detailed overview of Munro’s career, one that is confirmed further by the pleasures of the book at hand. The reader finds “on every page the particular satisfactions of prose that is supple, tart and spare, yet elegant and complex.” In the midst of this writing, Shields sees Munro “guarding, by means of her unpredictable cadences and spirited vocabulary, the particular salt and twang of rural Ontario – the corner of the universe that Munro calls home. Her voice is unmistakably her own. Artlessness collides with erudition in almost every paragraph, but in Munro’s hands these contradictions seem natural, just one more manifestation of a planet whose parts are unbalanced, mismatched, puzzling and random.” Like several other reviewers, Shields notices that in
Friend
the “time line moves all over the place.… Munro is good at handling long windy stretches of time, whole lifetimes or generations, and the stories here seem even bolder in this respect.… Many of the stories are cunningly hinged to moments in time: these stories draw breath from narrowlyavoided accidents, the mock suicide, the almost tragedy, the near brush with happiness.” Working through her material, Munro “is careful about leaving keys. A reader can almost always find in the closing pages of a Munro piece a little silver ingot of compaction, an insight that throws light on the story. These sentences are often her most graceful, and they are skillfully embedded in the text, cushioned by the colloquialism and ease that define her writing.” Summing up Munro’s work, though not the book itself, Shields writes with precision that the “enchantment to be found in Munro’s books lies in the countless, vivid shocks of recognition between reader and writer.”
    Such vivid shocks of recognition might be seen to characterize
Friend of My Youth
, certainly, but they also encompass the whole of Munro’s work during the 1980s. Like her narrator in “Meneseteung,” Munro may be seen focused on the day-to-day, wondering, seeing “this trickle in time, making a connection, rescuing one thing from the rubbish.” 33 Alice Munro’s progress continued, but with
Friend of My Youth
she most emphatically was Alice Munro.

“She’s Our Chekhov”
Open Secrets, Selected Stories, The Love of a Good Woman,
1990–1998
    It was anarchy she was up against – a devouring muddle. Sudden holes and impromptu tricks and radiant vanishing consolations.
– “Carried Away”
    The corn in tassel, the height of summer passing, time opening out with room for ordinary anxieties, weariness, tiffs, triviality. No more hard edges, or blamelessness, or fate buzzing around in your veins like a swarm of bees. Back where nothing seems to be happening, beyond the change of seasons.
– “What Do You Want to Know For?”
    But Chekhov’s art is more than merely Chekhovian. It is dedicated to explicit and definitive portraiture and the muscular trajectory of whole lives. Each story, however elusive or broken off, is nevertheless exhaustive – like the curve of a shard that implies not simply the form of the pitcher entire, but also the thirsts of its shattered civilization.
– Cynthia Ozick, “A Short Note on ‘Chekhovian’ ”
    M unro’s most ubiquitous publisher’s blurb is one Cynthia Ozick made available to Ann Close some time in the late 1980s: “She is our Chekhov, and is going to outlast most of her contemporaries.” It first appeared above the flap copy in the Knopf
Friend of My Youth
; the first phrase ran on the back of the Canadian edition’s dust jacket; and it has been used to describe Munro’s reputation repeatedly since,