Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

such a story, looking at “the purpose ofher art, the justification for it.” Working her way through the narrator’s story, her history and her relations with Alfrida both as a child and later, when she saw her one time when she lived in the same town while attending university, Franklin focuses on the narrator’s key realization: “ ‘More like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories’ – we are back with the teenaged Munro, looking out the window at the horses on the scale, at the image that reveals the story that falls into place around it. And here it is not something to be fit in between diaper changes, but ‘the work I wanted to do.’ The short story has been chosen after all.”
    It is probably worth noting that the
Yale Review
allowed Michael Ravitch ten pages to consider
Hateship
at considerable length. There he begins, “The modest airs of Alice Munro’s short stories slyly conceal their extraordinary amplitude.” Placing her work within the contexts of the twentieth-century short story, citing Hemingway, noting realism and other trends, Ravitch asserts that Munro “embraces all that her contemporaries repudiated: exposition and analysis, plot and character. She writes about very specific places … and invites history back into fiction, with all its messy complications. Her characters are far from rootless; in fact, they tend to feel burdened by attachments they cannot easily shed. They live in an old world, a world in which memory is still more powerful than forgetting, a world full of unusual and vivid stories.” Ravitch continues to make specific points within his generalities, including “Leaving home, in one form or another, is the perpetual drama for Munro” and “no matter how far they travel, [her characters] can never free themselves of the spell of family.” Citing “What Is Remembered,” Ravitch asserts that “Munro writes about sexuality with more lyrical intensity than any writer since D.H. Lawrence.” He ultimately concludes that “Munro is ironic to the point of nihilism. No rapture survives her scrutiny, no certainty earns her confidence,” and she has an “almost inhuman acceptance [which] may be key to her immense imaginative powers: armed with her wise humor, she is equal to whatever shall happen.”
    Reviews from Great Britain offer many of the same judgements though, again, less extensively. The anonymous reviewer in the
Economist
maintains that the “greatest pleasure of reading Ms Munro, though, is the prose itself: unaffected, modest, quietly elegant.… She is one of the most accomplished and downright exhilarating writers working today. Her human understanding is acute.” Lisa Allardice in the
New Statesman
notes that although “Munro flirts with melodrama, the undertone of grim humour is unmistakable: an atheist’s long-suffering widow finds comfort in the arms of an undertaker; the terminally ill wife of a sanctimonious social worker kisses a young thug, and a woman with Alzheimer’s rekindles romance with an old flame.… There is nothing ordinary about Alice Munro’s writing.” Writing in the
London Review of Books
, Benjamin Markovits notes that
Hateship
“reads like a book, which is all the more remarkable given the variety of narrators, and narrative styles, it employs: from the traditional device of the title-story … to the seemingly undoctored memories of ‘Family Furnishings.’ ” John McGahern in the
Times Literary Supplement
asserts that Munro “has an imaginative boldness.” He too takes up “the rich and surefooted ‘Family Furnishings’ ” and concludes with this estimation: “Everything is true and breathtakingly sure and is as good as Alice Munro has ever written, which is to say that it is written as well as anybody who has written in her time, and with her own uniqueness.” 4
“The Most Wonderful Walks You Can Imagine”: The Alice Munro Literary Garden,
No Love Lost
    Following her first Giller Prize in November 1998, Munro continued to receive public attention. Some of this was caused by the success of
Love
, some by the Giller (and Gibson’s ongoing public irritation with the Governor General’s Award committee for failing to even shortlist the book), but most was just in genuine recognition of the power and reach of her writing. At home,
Maclean’s
included her in its Honour Roll for 1998 with a brief profile featuring a photo of Munro standing by the shore of Lake Huron: “ ‘I love