Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Laidlaw-Radford, Munro’s sister. Given the length of the book’s title, Knopf decided to forgo an image and just use type. As the book was being set and was well in to the process heading toward the printer, Munro once again called Gibson with a specific request about its production, though what she wanted was not so dramatic as it had been when she called about
Who
: “Doug, I understand that there’s a new recycled, environmentally friendly type of paper that can be used for books,” Gibson recalled Munro saying. “I’d like my book to be printed on it.” Although it took considerable doing, McClelland & Stewart gave Munro what she wanted, just as Macmillan had: the Canadian edition of
Hateship
bears the note “Forest Friendly” on its dust jacket. (Munro’s decision had a widespread impact on the Canadian book trade; many other authors and publishers have followed suit, and now a much higher proportion of books are beingprinted on recycled stock.) McClelland & Stewart published in October and by January had got 43,000 copies out. By mid-October the book was atop the
Globe and Mail
’s bestseller list. Knopf’s edition appeared in November; Chatto & Windus also published in November in Great Britain. The Knopf edition was anticipated the previous month in
Publishers Weekly
with this forecast: “Munro’s collections are true modern classics, as the 75,000 first printing of her latest attests. Expect vigorous sales.”
    Just before that forecast
Publishers Weekly
concluded its brief but categorical review, “The stories share Munro’s characteristic style, looping gracefully from the present to the past, interpolating vignettes that seem extraneous and bringing the strands together in a deceptively gentle windup whose impact takes the breath away. Munro has few peers in her understanding of the bargains women make with life and the measureless price they pay.” As with her books from the 1990s, Munro received a remarkable range of reviews for
Hateship
– broad in numbers and types of publications – and like those focused on the books of the previous decade, its reviews spend considerable effort trying to define just how her work is so very good, so very affecting.
    Singular among such reviews is Mona Simpson’s “A Quiet Genius” in the
Atlantic Monthly
, an extended personal meditation on what Munro’s work means to one reader and a somewhat grumpy assertion that it still needs to be better known. A writer herself, Simpson had met Munro when she came to New York for the U.S. launch of
The Moons of Jupiter
in 1983 and had interviewed her for
The Paris Review
. Simpson’s review of
Hateship
is published beneath a singular, now often quoted, cutline: “Alice Munro is the living writer most likely to be read in a hundred years.” Beginning by looking back on herself when she discovered Munro’s writing, in her twenties working in publishing in New York, Simpson wrote that she “read Alice Munro’s stories of adulterous wives, and country girls gutting turkeys, with the page-turning avidity of someone discovering her own true future.” She and a friend read them together, they “read them deeply personally, to learn how to live.” Thus in reviewing
Hateship
Simpson writes as a person who has been reading Munro for over twenty years, a person who has long seenher work as resonant, a person who has met Munro (twice, at least) and wants to differentiate between the person and the genius. “A Quiet Genius” is an indicative review: in it, Simpson more than persuades her readers of the importance of Munro’s work – to her personally and when compared to both Munro’s contemporaries and past masters of fiction. Simpson quotes Richard Ford, who says that he is “in awe of how she operates in the third person.… She manages to make that third person
do
more than anybody I’ve ever seen in my life.” For Simpson in
Hateship
, Munro’s “men and women … are now seen from the perspective of an adult watching the doings of kindergarten children. She is far beyond taking sides.” Like many reviewers, Simpson is drawn to “Family Furnishings,” a writer’s story that both echoes Munro autobiographically and is also quite fictional, and like other reviewers she fastens on a final image of the narrator, completely apart, not connected to anyone else, watching: “such happiness, to be alone.”
    Bronwyn Drainie, the first Canadian reviewer to weigh in, was also attracted to this