Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

details, Jones comments too that “the bold assurance with which Munro works carries with it an implied sense of risk. It is a challenge so seductive, with everything on the line, that you can’t help but take her up on it. So every time you egg her on. And every time she pulls it off, leaving us slack-jawed with wonder and filled with delight.”
    Beyond the superlatives of the response to
Open Secrets
, there is also the sense that in Munro her readers have a writer who transcends the narrowly provincial, ironically, by knowing her home place so well and focusing so unerringly on its details, its textures. Thus Ann Hurlbert in the
New York Review of Books:
    In Carstairs – more joltingly than in its predecessors Jubilee, Hanratty, Dalgleish – Munro is preoccupied with disconnections and unpredictable, implausible reconnections between then and now, between here in town and there beyond it. In turn, the jaggedness of the juxtaposition doesn’t feel predictably postmodern: more than a sense of relativist muddle, there is a sense of miracle in the transformations that have taken place.…
    She betrays no sense of the defensive insecurity about her region’s place on the map that Margaret Atwood has called the “the great Canadian victim complex.” On the contrary, the particular, peripheral sense of place that inspires her fiction gives her the assurance to matter-of-factly take up an especially large theme, the disorienting power of time.
    Defining Munro as “a regional writer without borders,” Hurlbert sees this quality most especially in “The Albanian Virgin,” which she regards as “a kind of symbolic culmination. In venturing so far from her traditional landscape, Munro has stumbled on a place in which her peculiar and powerful version of the provincial story meets a ritualized version of itself.” Following Lottar’s transformation from inopportune captive to Albanian virgin, Hurlbert acknowledges her escape but recognizes that it will lead to yet another: “As so often in Munro, the search for a new balance almost always means the discovery of new ambivalence.” ForMunro, the intertwining of Lottar’s Hollywood-like story with the narrator’s more usual longing for Nelson is a way of achieving “jolts of recognition amid strangeness.” Hurlbert is mistaken in characterizing Munro’s choice of Albania as a “stumble,” however: as Munro made clear when speaking to Gzowski, she saw the parallel between the Albanians’ acceptance of virgins in their midst and her own society’s view of “old maids.” Both were set apart by their disavowal of sex.
    Just as Munro foresaw, too, reviewers of
Open Secrets
paid particular attention to the ways she tells the stories it contains; many saw its stories as a new direction for her. In a long and careful review in the
Nation
, Ted Solotaroff comments that “both Munro and Carver have the authority of seeming to write directly from personal experience without the blind spots and obtrusiveness of the ego one finds in Hemingway or Cheever or Mary McCarthy.” He also writes that “Munro’s imagination is constitutionally dialectical”; that is, each observation seems to imply its opposite. He observes further that “it’s remarkable how many times Munro can place a woman in a man’s shadow or have it cross her life at its dividing line without seeming to limit or repeat herself.” Sensing her own history from her writing, Solotaroff continues, “She taps a rich vein in the broken marriages of the sixties era (one survivor looks back at it ‘as though she had once gone in for skydiving’), but the madness they are escaping from or into comes in various shapes and depths.” (He might have quoted this question from “Vandals,” “But what was living with a man if it wasn’t living inside his insanity?”)
    In her review in the
New Republic
, Wendy Lesser has much positive to say about the book but is also critical at various points. She says, for example, that “A Real Life” and “Spaceships Have Landed” are “like outtakes from an earlier Munro.” Lesser also takes exception to Munro’s description, in a
Paris Review
interview, of “The Jack Randa Hotel” as a story she wrote as “an entertainment.” Lesser quotes Munro’s remarks in that interview: in contrast to a story like “Friend of My Youth,” which “ ‘works at my deepest level,’ ” Munro said, “The Jack Randa Hotel” feels “ ‘lighter to me.… I