Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

…) or a sudden switch in viewpoint that changes the whole nature of the story.… By thus expanding – you might even say
exploding
– the fictional context, Ms. Munro reaches toward difficult truths.” She is able to do so because of her acute sensibility: “It’s no coincidence that almost every story in ‘Open Secrets’ has as its time frame the span of an entire life, for these stories draw upon the complexity of a mature, long-vigilant sensibility.” Maintaining that “fiction is the telling that startles, the telling that teaches,” Humphreys concludes: “Heedless of convention, hazarding everything, firmly convincing us of the unseen good despite acknowledging our fears and harrowing experiences, ‘Open Secrets’ is a book that dazzles with its faith in language and in life.”
    As with Woodcock’s review, Canadian critics assumed longstanding familiarity with Munro and with her work, a familiarity leading to a certain daunted quality in their assessments. Sharon Butala, in the
Globe and Mail
, begins by asking “Can Alice Munro fail?” and continues to write that when she read “The Albanian Virgin” in the
New Yorker
she thought Munro had, “but when I read it as one of eight stories in her new collection,
Open Secrets
, I realized it as necessary, even inevitable and in a sense the keystone of the collection.” Having established her own writing from the mid-1980s on, Butala adopts a mystified tone toward Munro’s work: “With each of her eight books I’ve grown more fascinated and more puzzled by her stories. They seem to me not written by a living human hand, more like the words carved on an ancient tomb, hidden for centuries from human eyes, till an archeologist unearths it, brushes away the dirt, and reveals the words that have always been there.” With this collection, Butala claims, she “saw at last how to read” Munro’s work: “In story after story she has given usglimpses of what lies buried beneath the façade of respectability and ‘normal’ lives.” Many reviewers, Butala among them, paid especial attention to “The Albanian Virgin” because of its apparent singularity within Munro’s work, set so far away from Huron County. Yet the story’s exotic locale and Hollywood-style plot are entwined with the quotidian details of a “normal” not disconnected from Munro’s own history: the narrator, left by her husband in London, Ontario, over her adulterous transgressions, moves to Victoria in the 1960s and opens a bookstore. She longs for Nelson, the lover she has herself left behind in London, hearing the story of the Albanian Virgin from Charlotte, a woman she has come to know through the store. As Munro told a reporter for the
New York Times
, “The two stories combined there are a romantic fairy tale and a sort of romance worked out in real life.” Acknowledging this, Butala calls
Open Secrets
“too good to be called merely brilliant: It is a marvel.… Munro treats the women of these stories with tenderness and honesty while she shines a merciless light on their (and our) pasts, to make us see what we forgot when we chose real lives.”
    Reaching much the same conclusion (“Munro reveals the exhilarating character of life itself”) in
Books in Canada
, Tim Struthers notices the reference to Thomas Hardy in “Carried Away” and writes that “like Hardy, in one magnificent volume of fiction after another, Munro is able to explore with increasing graveness and love, with increasing precision and wonder, the complexities of the human condition.” Without the literary antecedent, most reviewers in the popular press struck similar chords. Munro’s work, David Holmstrom wrote in the
Christian Science Monitor
, has “the hallmark of surprise, of creating such sharp twists in the lives of seemingly ordinary women and men that her fiction comes loaded with important, timeless questions hiding in the narrative.” In
Time
, R.Z. Sheppard quotes Louisa’s apprehension at the end of the story of life as “a devouring muddle,” in Munro’s phrase, and continues, “It takes some living to get to this insight. Other than Munro’s considerable talent, the only constants in these stories are remorseless time and blind fate.” Malcolm Jones, Jr., holds in
Newsweek
that “Munro’s wonderfully compressed tales are not easily summarized” since each of them “contains enough Dickensian detail to flesh out alesser writer’s novel.” Citing instances and