Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

story, writing in
Quill & Quire
that it “could be subtitled ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Cool Young Bitch.’ ” It is “the most disturbing story in the collection” and represents “the writer’s dilemma and the writer’s curse. The selfishness is necessary to the creativity, but it distances the writer from the very people she most wants and needs to impress.” Recalling the 1974 essay in which everything is “touchable and mysterious,” Drainie concludes that Munro “remains faithful to these two literary beacons, giving her readers clear, sensual realities to experience and then leaving them to wonder and ponder.”
    Toronto’s
Globe and Mail
again called on a well-known writer, in this case Ann Beattie, who steps back from
Hateship
and asks, “Who among us understands the way things are?” and continues, “The boy from the past may reappear, rendered unobtainable by fate
(Nettles);
one may search for a missing person only to realize that the person is a sort of escape artist from her own life, eluding herself as well as the pursuer
(Queenie)
. Even furniture seems to have great mobility and to serve the same function as a character in many of these stories (the wonderful title story;
Family Furnishings, Queenie)
. Furniture, for heaven’s sake: It’s larger than life and can’t be cast off! It would be funny, exceptthat it carries the weight – is the weight – of the present-determining past.” Munro, she maintains in a passage that unknowingly picks up some of Ozick’s comments on Chekhov, “orients the reader toward realizing that a story is composed of pieces and shows us that shards, as well as neat slices, are necessary to complete the puzzle.”
    Not to be outdone, Toronto’s other national paper, the
National Post
, also commissioned a well-known writer, Anne Enright, to review
Hateship
. She begins by deprecating a view of Munro’s writing that holds it “wants to be liked.” That is, the writing is accessible. “The democratic ease with which she tells her stories and the transparent quality of her prose mean you can love her work without realizing quite how good it is. Once this simple and singular fact clicks – that she is a brilliant writer – you can never read her with the same relaxed companionship again.” Acknowledging the truth of this, Enright reviews
Hateship
and concludes, “She has gotten better. The vultures who circle over literary reputations must be getting pretty fed up with Alice Munro.” While Enright has several perceptive things to say about individual stories, her sharpest point is a generalization about Munro’s art: “Sometimes it seems as though her work is all insight, but its greatness comes not just from letting us see inside a character. It comes from allowing us a larger view. Time and again, we pull back to see the image of a woman in a landscape, alone.”
    Merilyn Simonds, in the Montreal
Gazette
, contrasted
Hateship
to
Love
where she saw “a certain sadness, a despair” weigh its stories, “making them almost unbearable to read.… Her redeeming vision seemed to cloud.” Here “the tone is tougher, as if she’s rediscovered the fibre that gives resilience to the human heart.” Philip Marchand, in the
Toronto Star
, made something of the same point when he wrote that “some of Munro’s recent stories have been marked by so much withheld information that the effect has been a certain frustration for readers, as if the point of the story is known only to the angels and to Munro herself.” Like other reviewers, Marchand calls special attention to the last story in the collection, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” There Grant, a retired professor and longtime rué, ironically has to contend with his wife’s romance with another patient in the nursing home whereshe lives because of Alzheimer’s – in getting on, seemingly, with a new life, she has forgotten who Grant is.
    The novelist Thomas Wharton, in a fine review in the
Edmonton Journal
syndicated to other papers, begins by recalling a student of his in a writing class who argued that Munro’s stories were “too slow. ‘Why doesn’t she just get on with it?’ he wanted to know.” Disagreeing, Wharton argues that the stories in
Hateship
do “ ‘get on with it,’ but they do it in the way our lives do: with stops and starts and backtrackings and revelations, surprises that divert us from our intended path along unexpected branchings.” Wharton feels