Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

that, with Munro, it is important “not to read too much, too fast.” Central incidents in her stories are key, but beyond them “the stories trace the shape of a life.… Reading Alice Munro,” he concludes, “is a quiet reminder that, amid the big ideas, the big important books always in a rush to sum up ‘society as a whole,’ it is always the solitary, observing, ultimately unknowable self to whom life, and death, happen.” Striking a similar note in the
Ottawa Citizen
, the Scottish critic Catherine Lockerbie calls the stories in
Hateship
“wise and wry, true and endlessly moving,” writing also that they “achieve the only proper purpose of literature and art: to touch us more deeply and teach us more fully what it means to be human.”
    Not all Canadian reviewers were prepared to revel in
Hateship
. Candace Fertile in the
Vancouver Sun
argues that, “after dozens of stories, the style gets predictable and verges on self-parody.” There is also the question of audience: “Munro’s stories have increasingly become meaningful to a smaller group – generally, older women who grew up at a time when women’s options were severely limited.” And though Munro handles her material with real dexterity, “the ‘stifled woman’ theme and the generally negative view of men get a bit tiresome.” Fertile seems intent on spotting and poking at weaknesses, and like several other reviewers she is not taken by the title story. (Roughly the same number, though, see it as one of the best.)
    By the time of
Hateship
, Simpson’s assertions notwithstanding, there is little discernible material difference between Munro’s reviews in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain to see real differences in reputation in each country. True, in Canada there remains the matterof Munro as a “national treasure,” but in the United States and Great Britain her reputation was established sufficiently among critics so that reviewers are by and large focused on the same elements and show an equal deep appreciation. What is evident, and this is what makes Simpson’s piece so interesting, is that with this book foreign critics took the long view of Munro’s art that was already so familiar in Canada. Thus Jeff Giles in
Newsweek
begins by writing that
Hateship
“isn’t as good as her best work, but virtually nothing is.” Noting an unevenness, he maintains that the “best stories here resonate so deeply that the rest feel drab.” Michiko Kakutani in the
New York Times
begins by seeing Munro’s women as equivalent to Updike’s men, writing that she “has created tales that limn entire lifetimes in a handful of pages, tales whose emotional amplitude and keen sense of the mundane muddles of ordinary life have established her over the last three decades as one of the foremost practitioners of the short story.” Like other reviewers who have written on Munro’s previous books, Kakutani notices that the “people in this volume tend to be somewhat older versions of people we met in Ms. Munro’s earliest stories.” Noting especially “Nettles,” “Family Furnishings,” and “Post and Beam,” Kakutani asserts that “these tales have the intimacy of a family photo album and the organic feel of real life, and they give us portraits created not through willful artifice, but through imaginative sympathy and virtuosic craft.” The
New York Times Book Review’s
notice, by William H. Pritchard, does not especially stand out – uncharacteristically, in view of the prominence of his previous reviews there. Pritchard summarizes the stories well enough, and like many others he lingers on “Family Furnishings,” but Pritchard offers very little by way of differentiated insight.
    That certainly cannot be said of Lorrie Moore’s review in the
New York Review of Books
. Likening Munro’s insights into domesticity to those of Henry James, Moore offers this telling assessment:
    Unlike James, a permanent tourist in the land of marriage and romantic union – a subject endlessly suited to the short-story genre – Alice Munro is intimately informed about what actually goes on there, and it is but one of the many reasons she is (tospeak historically, and to speak even, say, in a Russian or French or even Irish saloon, loudly and unarmed) one of the world’s greatest short story writers. As the writer Ethan Canin once said, “The stories of Alice Munro make everyone else’s look like the work of babies.”
    She is also