Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Stories
, one can only surmise, is to elicit homage such as I have just rendered; the book may widen Ms. Munro’s admiring American audience, but to her
oeuvre
it adds precisely nothing.
    While Byatt’s and Updike’s reviews stand out among those the
Selected Stories
received, other reviewers made comments well worth noting too. Dennis Duffy in
Books in Canada
sidesteps Updike’s complaints as to the authority of selection and maintains that Munro was here “offering her readers a cyclical way of reading her work” and in “her selections [she] has pruned … a suite from each of her collections. Each successive suite builds upon what has gone before, as subjects, themes, and stylistic motifs recur, often in a more complex fashion.” The effect of this, Duffy writes, is that the
Selected Stories
“takes on that monumentality that we have always sensed in Munro’s fiction, but which is now unmistakably apparent.” He then continues to demonstrate his meaning by comparing the selections from
Who
and
Open Secrets;
while the comparison is a bit forced at times, there is noquestioning that this volume puts stories in new relation to one another, creating new meanings.
    Writing in the
Times Literary Supplement
, Adam Mars-Jones saw Munro’s
Selected Stories
as perhaps a book to “re-establish the reputation of a writer whose time has been felt to have come and gone,” citing Cheever’s collected stories as such an instance and writing that Munro “has never been in fashion.… Is she doomed to remain (terrible accolade) a writer’s writer?” Mars-Jones notes in an apt phrase that “there are signs from some of her most characteristic sentences that she actively chooses not to be a comic writer.” This is true enough, but his best observation comes in response to a passage in “Lichen”: “In passages like this, Munro’s eye and ear, her heart and mind, move beyond the categories of forgiving and unforgiving. The tides of richness and bleakness in her writing pass through each other without making a ripple.” James Wood, another British reviewer writing in the
London Review of Books
, sees Munro as being like V.S. Pritchett, writing that like him, “Alice Munro is such a good writer that nobody bothers anymore to judge her goodness.… Her reputation is like a good address.” Like Pritchett’s stories too, “Munro’s are fat with community: her characters steal their lean solitude from the thickness that surrounds them.” He also notes that “tiny seeds of comedy lie hidden in the folds of every story in this collection.” Noting the ill mother in “Images,” unaware of the specifics of Munro’s own mother or of Munro’s own history, Woods nevertheless infers just what she creates in those stories connected to Anne Chamney Laidlaw: “This mother, who recurs throughout the book, may not be an autobiographical ghost. Seen so tenderly yet so comically, betraying herself in the act of protecting herself, she can, however, be seen as the spirit of these stories.”
    As with the comparison to Gallant, John Banville in the
New York Review of Books
treats
Selected Stories
alongside William Trevor’s
After Rain
. He sees the two together in producing short stories “subtle and rich,” “heartening and heart-rending.” More largely, Banville sees the survival of the short story as a form – one “largely untouched by modernism” – as demonstrating “the tenacity of its practitioners.” Connecting both writers to the
New Yorker
(since half of Trevor’s storiesfirst appeared there and just over half of Munro’s), he sees that magazine as playing a crucial role in keeping the short story alive and well. When looking at the ending of “Friend of My Youth” and connecting it to Trevor’s title story, “After Rain,” Banville maintains that in each the knowledge the writer achieves, the sense the reader gets, is “delicate, luminous, and moving.” 9

    Updike’s caustic comments at the end of his otherwise laudatory review seem to have had a telling effect, and rather quickly. In early January 1997 Gibson reported to his colleagues that he had “just learned that in the U.S. they plan to launch a Vintage paperback edition – complete with an all-new Introduction by Alice – in November 1997.”
    This offered McClelland & Stewart both a problem and an opportunity as they sold their
Selected Stories
. Details of their own paperback, ultimately licensed to Penguin Canada for five