Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

fortitude to be a servant” and her reading made her feel as if she “had just been rescued from my life. Words could become a burning-glass for me in those days, and no shame of my nature or condition could hold out among the flares of pleasure.” There is a certainty in this story’s epiphany, and in the narrator’s realization of her embarked self, that Munro apparently could no longer countenance; “Hired Girl” remained consigned to its single appearance in the
New Yorker
until it was included in
The View from Castle Rock
in 2006.
    What Munro wanted in all of the eight stories she included in
Open Secrets
were new qualities of suggestion, deliberate suggestion without certainty. The risks she took and the effects she achieved were noticed at once. Characterizing
Open Secrets
for the
New York Times
bestseller list, an anonymous editor wrote that the book contains “bold, ambitious, risky short stories that never stop where stopping would be easy but go on to reach for the most expensive and difficult truths.” Always among the first to appear, the review in
Publishers Weekly
asserted that even though all the stories had appeared in serials, “to read them here is in many ways to read each anew. The careful ordering of these works, the casual reappearances of characters in various entries, the layering of time, the unity of place – all expand the depth of each entry, heightening the illusion that Munro’s fiction is as infinitely startling as life itself.”David Helwig in the Montreal
Gazette
wrote, “You never know, the stories keep saying, you just never know, and what you come to suspect might be almost unbearable. This is gossip informed by genius.” 4
    Writing in
Quill & Quire
, George Woodcock’s review put Munro’s career in long perspective; he remembers that Munro “was already much talked about in literary circles” when he met her during the 1950s, so much so that when it was published,
Dance
“seemed almost like a summing-up.” It was nothing of the sort, of course, since her books have continued to appear, he conceded.
Open Secrets
offers eight stories that are “close to novellas.… For what she is doing is taking the world of experience and discovering its inner light, so that, however mundane the situation, however tedious and sometimes repellent the characters, life stands before us, rendered into perfectly pitched prose, into preternatural observation, into some splendid creative synthesis, the product of a life of writing both modest and wholly exemplary.” In the
New York Times
, Michiko Kakutani notes that many of these stories “are set in the distant past” and so “the volume as a whole feels somewhat more detached than earlier Munro collections.” Kakutani also notes the numerous abrupt shifts in characters’ lives here: “Given Ms. Munro’s consummate control of her craft, these often startling developments never come across as mere plot twists or gratuitous displays of authorial invention. Rather, they feel like wholly organic developments in her characters’ lives.” In her hands, “the ‘swift decision’ and ‘unforeseen intervention’ become metaphors for the unpredictability of life, the incalculable imagination of fate.”
    Josephine Humphreys, in the
New York Times Book Review’s
lead review, begins with “Carried Away” and asserts that all the stories in Munro’s book “are lessons. Ms. Munro’s work has always been ambitious and risky precisely because it dares to teach, and by the hardest, best method: without giving answers.” Continuing with “Carried Away,” Humphreys writes of Jack Agnew’s decapitation at Douds that “few writers would dare such a move, and fewer still could make it work. But Ms. Munro does. The narrative fabric into which this horrible event is woven is tight with a sense of time and place, a solid realism that allows even the bizarre to appear normal.” In the world of thesestories, though, “some parts of life aren’t quickly apprehendable through language” so that “the open secrets, near-at-hand mysteries that can’t readily be talked or written into clarity” abound. Munro focuses on such secrets, weaving their meaning into her characters’ lives, with audacious technique: “Every story in the collection contains some sort of startling leap, whether it’s a huge jump forward in time (more than 100 years in ‘A Wilderness Station’), a geographical change (as in ‘The Jack Randa Hotel’