Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Marchand, writes from long familiarity: “Munro never lets us walk away without knowing that some other narrative was possible, and she has always been a master at showing us how missed cues and misperceptions can alter the course of an entire life. And an entire life is what we get in each of these stories, the full canvas. One of the great mysteries of Alice Munro’s genius as a writer of short stories is just how she manages to cause her readers to feel closer to the characters she creates than they do to certain members of their own family.” Judith Timson, reviewing
Runaway
in
Maclean’s
, maintained that “in Alice Munro’s hands, the smallest moments contain the central truths of a lifetime, in which disaster, honesty and hope are teased out as if indeed there was not a minute to lose.” These stories, Bruce Erskine in the Halifax
Chronicle-Herald
asserted, “demonstratehow random, arbitrary and false life can be, and how little we truly know about what we experience.”
    In the United States, such ready familiarity with Munro’s work as that found in Canada was evident too. A. Alvarez, in the
New York Review of Books
, begins an extended review by focusing on the three characters in the title story, writing that they “are held tight together by a net of erotic tension.” Like many reviewers, Alvarez found “Passion” to be the volume’s singular story and used it to generalize about Munro’s women, who “assume from the start that love doesn’t last, marriages go sour, and people generally are unfaithful.… Her pessimism in these new stories is relentless.” That this review beat the
Publishers Weekly
notice for
Runaway
to press was an indication of Munro’s still-growing status. “One never knows quite where a Munro story will end,” the anonymous
PW
reviewer asserted, “only that it will leave an incandescent trail of psychological insight.”
    These reviews began a progress in the United States that is remarkable both for its range of publication and the unanimity of its verdict. From one end of the country to the other – the
Hartford Courant
to the
Seattle Times
–
Runaway
was seen as yet another offering from an accomplished, known, and well-appreciated author. The two reviews produced by the
New York Times
were at something of cross purposes, however: Michiko Kakutani, who has been reviewing Munro since
Progress
, wrote in “Books of the
Times”
that the triptych of Juliet stories offers “an affecting portrait [and] the harrowing trajectory of her life, but most of the entries in this volume are more stilted affairs.” Kakutani feels that unlike Munro’s previous work, these stories seemed forced, “relying on awkwardly withheld secrets and O’Henryesque twists to create narrative suspense.” Other reviewers, including Mary Hawthorne in the
London Review of Books
, also felt that some of these structural shifts failed to convince.
    At the
New York Times Book Review
, the editor apparently followed up on Jonathan Franzen’s admiring comment in the
New York Times Magazine
profile of Munro on October 24 and commissioned a four-page lead review of
Runaway
by Franzen. His review is singular in thatit reviews
Runaway
without telling the reader anything about any of the stories in the book.
    Franzen began: “Alice Munro has a strong claim to being the best fiction writer now working in North America, but outside of Canada, where her books are No. 1 best sellers, she has never had a large readership.” Franzen meant large by U.S. standards. Working against recent books that have had “large readerships” – Bill Clinton’s autobiography and Philip Roth’s
The Plot Against America
– Franzen wrote that “I want to circle around Munro’s latest marvel of a book,
Runaway
, by taking some guesses at why her excellence so dismayingly exceeds her fame.” He then continued to offer eight guesses, most of which are utterly accurate (“Munro’s work is all about storytelling pleasure,” “Because, worse yet, Munro is a pure short-story writer”). Franzen considers the perennial question of short story writers versus novelists, asserting that beyond “the Great One herself” – Munro – “the most exciting fiction written in the last 25 years – the stuff I immediately mention if somebody asks me what’s terrific – has been short fiction.” He then offered a long list of names. He also conjectured that because reviewing fiction is harder than non-fiction, and