Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

one moment, one memory, into another with an unrivaled combination of clarity and subtlety.”
    Two more points in Gorra’s excellent review are worth noting. To end it he writes that “nothing in this volume is finer than its long title story.” Contrasting its structure to what he calls “the formal balance” of “Jakarta,” Gorra describes the circumstances of the three boys whodiscover Mr. Willens’s body submerged in his little blue Austin (the Munros owned an Austin in the 1960s) and writes: “We never make it back to the boys on whom Munro spent the story’s first 30 pages. But that structural dissonance, that enormous loose end, is precisely what makes the story’s conclusion seem so large and enigmatic.” Second, Gorra writes that “long ago, Woolf described George Eliot as one of the few writers ‘for grown-up people.’ The same might today, and with equal justice, be said of Alice Munro.”
    Given the precision and thought with which van Herk and Gorra analyzed
The Love of a Good Woman
, their reviews certainly warrant the detailed attention featured here, but the book consistently drew excellent analysis wherever one looks. In
Time
, R.Z. Sheppard maintained that “it’s Munro’s quality, not her quantity, that puts her in the company of today’s most accomplished writers” and he likens her “balance of compassion and detachment [to] Minerva, the goddess of wisdom.” In the
Yale Review
Michael Frank, reviewing the book along with Lorrie Moore’s
Birds of America
, discusses Enid’s nursing of Mrs. Quinn in the title story, writing, “It is all so authentic, so subtle, so
felt
– the woman, the house, the children, the smell. Past and present join in a slow summery swirl of heat and dying. The reader has forgotten all about the opening – until, quite casually, Mrs. Quinn one day asks Enid if she went to Mr. Willens funeral when he drowned.” Focusing on the boy in “Save the Reaper” – a character, one notes, who reprises in age and perspective the narrator in “Images” – Frank discusses Munro’s concern for the “private work of storing and secreting, deciding on the meaning of one’s own experience: this young boy is at the beginning of the journey Munro sends all her characters on, in all her stories.… She believes in the revelation of meaning,” Frank concludes, and so her stories stay with a reader who has scrutinized them: “So powerful an afterlife is central to the sustaining magic of Alice Munro.”
    Barbara Croft, in the
Women’s Review of Books
, focuses sharply on the book at hand, writing that “Munro permits herself the latitude of a novelist, and the resulting stories achieve an extraordinary depth and range.” Croft offers a metaphor that, while a bit hackneyed, still applies:
    These stories are like a flock of birds in flight. Separate, often disparate-seeming, elements are swept along by the energy of the narrator’s voice. We
feel
a kind of magnetic force holding the characters and incidents together, but it’s never clear, until the very end, just how these elements are linked. The moment of revelation is achieved quietly, often with an image from nature or a short, simple line of exposition.
    Croft concludes, “These are amazing stories.… On the surface, they seem almost artless, meandering and random, cluttered with detail. But they will haunt you.”
    In Britain, reviews were of much the same cast though, as usual, a bit more distant. Referring to Munro’s women, an unnamed reviewer in the
Economist
notes that “accidental revelations, nightmares … barge into their lives – parodic, unbidden, unwanted reflections of the everyday.… The cost, of course, is an inner loneliness.” Elizabeth Lowry, writing in the
Times Literary Supplement
, sees Munro’s talent as extremely fine but ultimately limited – she does not buy comparisons to Proust and Chekhov, although she feels Munro’s abilities in writing “Canadian Gothic” are unique. Noting that “the dazzlingly exact specificity of the prose is deceptive, promising a solid world that is in fact highly unstable,” Lowry disputes with Munro who, she says, “remains uneasily convinced that love – the getting of love, the keeping of love, the loss of love, the getting over the loss of love – is the central fact of female experience.” This, effectively, is Munro’s limitation. Tamsin Todd in the
New Statesman
wonders about Munro’s reputation: “There are a good