Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

embodies the whole of her characters’ lives in the story – the staying of children who never do stay but also do stay, in various ways, as they go – Munro’s phrase captures her effect.
    Byatt’s review of
Love
is one of three appearing in Canada, each by another woman writer, that bear special notice. Addressing “Save the Reaper,” one of Munro’s strangest and most telescopic stories, ever, Byatt describes Munro’s complex handling of time and suggests that “only another writer, perhaps, could know how difficult that pace was to direct and control.” Concluding, Byatt draws attention to one of the stories first published in
Love
, “My Mother’s Dream,” and seems almost to exclaim: “Consider the effect, as you read this comic, moving, and wild tale, of the choice of the baby herself as the narrator, describing the dead show-off and obsessed artist stopped in her tracks. Who but Alice Munro could have turned the moral and drama of a tale on the choice made by a speechless infant lost under a sofa, and made the reader feel that something had been achieved and understood, against the odds?” As here, Byatt noticed particular details and described just how she saw them as effective. By contrast, Jane Urquhart in the
Ottawa Citizen
does something of the same but mostly just describes the stories and gushes her admiration (“And what rich canvases they are!”).
Love
, she concludes, is an “extraordinary achievement which, while it in no way diminishes her earlier work, takes the genius of her insight to yet another level.”
    The third review of
Love
by another woman writer in a Canadian publication was Aritha van Herk’s “Between the Stirrup and the Ground” in the
Canadian Forum
. It, along with Michael Gorra’s in the
New York Times Book Review
, concedes Munro’s accomplishment and genius but then sharply analyzes this writer’s relation to her audience – together, these two brief reviews capture her position in fall 1998. Van Herk begins by writing that “readers approach a new volume of stories by Alice Munro with an awe that arguably no other writer in Canada inspires.” A bit snidely, van Herk has critics on their knees, editors genuflecting, and readers clutching the new Munro book; with more than a hint of a sneer, she notes that many of its stories “have already appeared in
The New Yorker
, that arbiter of excellence for all Canadian writing.” The reasons for such reactions are complex, van Herk knows, but she wonders if “a Munro story rehearses the suspicion that everything we value in Canadian culture is inherited from the1950s.… Certainly, a volume by Munro offers none of the zesty spike of the unknown, none of the crisp window of the previously un-encountered. Hers is a territory we recognize, a space we are complicit with.” Concluding her preamble, van Herk asks if Munro’s fiction is “a yardstick for Canada’s sense of self?”
    To answer this question, in stark contrast to Urquhart’s gushings about Munro as a “national treasure,” she probes the world Munro delimits with a sharp critical eye. “Reading Munro is akin to opening an album of black and white photographs and remembering the names of maiden aunts and lecherous cousins otherwise forgotten.” Though she notes the feeling of the 1950s running through these stories, van Herk is at her best in describing atmosphere and character: “Munro evokes intensely claustrophobic atmospheres with tonal precision. A sinister stone of judgement weighs heavily on these stories and their characters. The world portrayed is hypocritical; every ordinary face masks a monster.” True enough, but van Herk also makes an essential point about Munro, and about her work, that is too seldom made: “Snide class judgements are frequent.” Although Munro early achieved a middle-class way of living through family aspiration, study, and marriage, her Lower Town Wingham upbringing has never left her – it echoes throughout her work.
    While it is possible to read van Herk’s review as one writer disdaining the subject and method of another more successful one, that is giving it too short a shrift. Placing Munro’s later work within a defined context of Canadian culture, not giving in to the dominant gush, is a fair approach for any reviewer, but especially one writing in the nationalist
Canadian Forum
. Yet even though van Herk announces such matters in her preamble, she ultimately reviews the vision of humanity