Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

interested in social class. And there is not one of her stories in this new book that does not put together characters with real if subtle class divisions between them. This Munro does with a neutral, unsentimental eye and limber sympathies.
    Moore anticipates disputation over which stories are the strongest and, quite rightly, she expects that “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” “may come under the most fire.” Yet she sees the title story as embarked on one of Munro’s “signature themes – the random, permanent fate brought about by an illusion of love.” Luxuriating in Munro’s style, Moore writes that the ending of “Nettles” with its “swift and economical use of the word ‘dwindling,’ thriftily closing two stories at once, is Munro at her stunning best.”
    Like many other writer-reviewers, Moore also sees “Family Furnishings” as arguably “the finest story in
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
, and surely one of several here that are among the most powerful she has written.” So impressed is Moore by the story (“There is not a more moving piece by anyone that I can think of”) that she devotes over a third of her space to its analysis. “Family Furnishings” is, as Moore asserts, an “exploration of the spiritual escape and emotional cost of becoming a writer.” Like other reviewers who note this story, Moore is aware of Del Jordan and some other would-be writers elsewhere in Munro’s work; like them, too, she makes no mention of either “Material” or of “Dulse,” two earlier protracted analyses of the writer’s self-absorption. Quite rightly, Moore sees “Family Furnishings” “as an acknowledgement of [the literary life’s] emotional distances and thefts and its willing trade of the human for art. It is a song of relief alloyed with shame. Munro has beautifully registered the ambivalent conscience of the writer – not judgmentally but helplessly, as before love and the life story love brings before dying.”
    The intellectual magazines in the United States offered good reviews of
Hateship
, too. In
Commonweal
, Tom Deignan begins by noting that “National Book Award-winner Jonathan Franzen made a fascinating admission” to the
New York Times Magazine
, that after DeLillo, the living author he most admired was Alice Munro. (This had been noticed as well by K. Gordon Neufeld when he reviewed
Hateship
in the
Calgary Herald
, and ever since Franzen reviewed
Runaway
in a famously enthusiastic way for the
New York Times Book Review
, it was recalled elsewhere too.) Contrasting DiLillo’s “sweeping intercontinental tomes with Munro’s exquisite portraits of confused Canadiana,” Deignan opts for Munro. “Take the endlessly plundered topic of gender,” he writes, “on which no author is quite as illuminating.” Citing “Family Furnishings,” he maintains that Munro’s “deft manipulation of past and present tense, of narrative voice, as well as her exploration of the writer’s role in society, put her postmodern credentials on display. But inevitably, the drama of love, mortality, and human entanglement trump such formal matters.” Deignan moves through the stories, noting in passing that Munro’s “stories sprawl, lacking a central focus. This is mostly a good thing, giving her stories a unique depth.” Ultimately, he concludes that “nobody ever has written stories quite like Alice Munro’s.”
    In the
New Republic
Ruth Franklin begins wondering just why Munro is undervalued. She cites a reviewer who “just came out and said what we were all thinking: ‘Alice Munro should write a novel.’ ” Franklin then takes up Munro’s introduction to her
Selected Stories
and examines the rationale Munro offers there for why she writes short stories – that when she was a young mother in Vancouver and Victoria, extended blocks of time were just not possible. Franklin is sceptical, and she remains so throughout her review, in which she moves carefully and precisely through the stories in
Hateship
. At one point, just before she takes up “Family Furnishings,” Franklin writes, “I hope that this will not be true, but there is an elegiac mood to this book that makes it feel as if it might be Munro’s last.” The reviewer notices how Munro’s characters have aged with her and that, as well, “several of the stories [here] read as answers to stories that Munro has written before.” “Family Furnishings” is just