Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

neither. These two careers spread out before us like monuments.” The co-publication of these two books “is the biggest publishing event we’re likely to see for decades.”
    Archer’s point that these two careers are “monuments in the making” was reinforced by most of the reviews, which focused on the shape of her career, the qualities of her prose, the ways her stories have attracted and kept readers. The review in
Newsweek
by Malcolm Jones, Jr. – his third there – is more profile than review since he had recently met Munro in Toronto; still, assessing her as a great writer who “just keeps getting better,” Jones makes the case that, as the piece’s subtitle declares, the “unassuming Alice Munro has quietly emerged as one of our greatest living writers.”
    Two reviews in particular, A.S. Byatt’s in the
Globe and Mail
and John Updike’s in the
New York Times Book Review
, are of special interest both because of who wrote them and because of what they have to say. Byatt’s opening paragraphs grab her reader sharply:
    Alice Munro is a great short story writer. She is the equal of Chekhov and de Maupassant and the Flaubert of the
Trois Contes
, as innovatory and illuminating as they are. My discovery of her work has changed the way I think about short fiction, and the way I write, over the last decade or so.
    Her stories are Canadian, rooted in a particular part of the earth and a particular society, full of precise details that make her world so lively that the foreign reader has the illusion of knowing exactly how those people and places were and are. (There are many good local writers who cannot perform this transfiguration.) She is a writer’s writer – I come back again and again to the felicity of particular sentences, particular narrative twists – but anyone could read her and recognize something, and then be shocked by the unexpected.
    Byatt’s sense of Munro’s work and its details of method, technique, and effect make her review singular among those Munro has ever received. The author of
Possession
continues, asserting that “even at the beginning of her career she almost never wrote a conventional ‘well-made story’; her tales concern episodes, reversals, revelations, but they are always concerned to contain
everything
, a whole life and quite a lot of what is behind it, in the short space.” Noting changes over time, the “increasing versatility” with which Munro handles “point of view and the eyes from which the story looks out,” Byatt ends by focusing on Munro’s passing mention of Cather in “Carried Away” and her treatment of the other writer as “a riddling object of contemplation in ‘Dulse’ ”: “I would guess that Munro has learned something about the shocking, the paradox of the formed in the formless, from that other local writer who transcended her local preoccupations without betraying them. But she really is unique; there is no one quite like her.”
    Updike offers much the same sort of review: summarizing Munro’s “recognizable heroine” through the stories read chronologically in the
Selected Stories
, he writes that she is likeable but “neither virtuous nor a victim; what she is is vital.” Stepping back from the stories themselves, Updike maintains that they “in their freedom of range, their intricatelyarranged surprises and their historical imagination, are like few others.” He sends readers back to pieces by Tolstoy and Chekhov; of contemporaries, “only the Mark Helprin of ‘A Dove of the East’ comes to mind.” As he might, Updike noted delicious bits along the way, writing at one point that “in one of the sternest of many stern asides, she has a character reflect that ‘love is not kind or honest and does not contribute to happiness in any reliable way.’ ” Summing Munro up, he asserts that she “is an implacable destiny spinner, whose authorial voice breaks into her fiction like that of a God who can no longer bear to keep quiet.”
    But if Byatt’s review is singular by its first paragraph’s, Updike’s is made so by its last:
    While not every story brought me equal illumination and delight, my main reservation about
Selected Stories
is the book itself. No preface or foreword offers to tell us who selected these stories, or why. All of them have been published in handier, pleasanter formats in previous collections, of which the most recent,
Open Secrets
, came out just two years ago. The purpose of
Selected