Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Munro herself offers rather than any nationalist concerns. She writes at one point, “There is a surface, and then there is the nether world below. And in Munro’s world that substratum inevitably collaborates with all that is ‘deliberately vile.’ ” Given this, “perhaps our fascination with Munro’s fiction is that she is really a virtuoso of domestic horror.” So van Herk concludes:
    These characters discover that they know more than they believe they know, and that knowledge, with its hungers and satisfactions, will enable them to survive every crucible. The hallucinatory extravagance that infects these stories is indeed akin to love of a good woman. Such a love goes beyond the gothic, to a grotesque realm that is almost hilarious – if it were not so horribly horrible.
    If van Herk’s precise review places and examines
Love
in an explicitly Canadian context, then Michael Gorra’s does the same thing in an explicitly American one. Like her, too, Gorra writes with a discerning critical sharpness that illumines the artist and art at hand in ways compelling and complete. Beginning, Gorra notes that Munro “most always presents her men as seen by women, [but] though she is no more interested in the lives of men than Conrad was in those of women, I would hesitate to call her a feminist writer.” Citing Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” he comments that Munro’s “work never feels as though it has had the question of gender thrust upon it,” and in this it differs from Lessing, or Morrison, or Woolf. More than this, Gorra likens Munro to Flannery O’Connor as a regionalist, a writer “whose achievement she may now have outstripped.” This comparison ultimately collapses for him, though, since Munro writes from “a radically different formal imperative” than O’Connor: “Munro’s feel for her own characters is, in contrast, as pure as Chekhov’s and as unviolated by any appeal to an external system of thought.”
    Like that sense in Munro’s work, Gorra feels a very great deal of accurate biographical information about this author by reading these stories well and by knowing the work of other writers. Commenting that there is no new territory in
Love
– “the moral geography of her fiction remains as familiar as its physical one” – he notes that “only one of these stories is rooted in the present, and though an element of retrospection has always been prominent in her work, never before has she seemed so autumnal, so concerned with mediating between the way we live now and the way we lived then.” Noting that most of the stories take placearound 1960 so that, read together, “they so reinforce one another as to amount to the portrait of a generation: a generation that came to adulthood with one set of rules and then found it could live with another; a generation of women through whom the great turn of our times first quickened into life.” Continuing, in prescient though quite accurate fashion, Gorra writes before fastening on to “Cortes Island”:
    The dates tell me that this is Munro’s own generation. But her stories never feel autobiographical. And yet nothing here looks like a performance, either, a voice put on or ventriloquized. Her work has a motion that seems as natural as walking. As natural? Better say as complicated, and then add that these stories walk not only forward but backward and sideways as well. They are never just about one character, one situation. They open out, always, into other lives and other moments.
    Summarizing details from Munro’s story narrated by the “Little Bride,” Gorra notes that there the narrator “casually and briefly evokes her own later married life – ‘the first house we owned, the second house … Until the last which I entered with inklings of disaster and the faintest premonitions of escape.’ ” There is no reason for Gorra to know it as he reads this passage, it is impressive enough that he senses it, but we know that this narrator’s words here were born in Munro’s own move into the house on Rockland in Victoria, her third daughter Andrea about to be born, she herself not much liking the place, not wanting to live there. Focused on this moment, not knowing but apprehending its autobiographical beginning, Gorra writes that at such moments “Munro’s work has the dazzling but utter simplicity of Wordsworth who, in lyrics like ‘The Two April Mornings’ and ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,’ could collapse