Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

stories harder than novels, Munro has got short shrift. Throughout, probably demonstrating that very point, he made no mention of any story in
Runaway
, preferring to discuss “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” from
Hateship
as his example of Munro’s art. In writing this quirky and well-informed review, Franzen used the bully pulpit of the lead feature review in the
New York Times Book Review
to make just one crucial point: “Read Munro! Read Munro!” Franzen called this a “simple instruction.” It is, and in a singular way, it must have had some effect.
    Of the wide range of detailed notices
Runaway
received in the United States, Lorrie Moore’s in the
Atlantic Monthly
, “Leave Them and Love Them,” is among the most considered. Beginning with Munro’s perpetual concern with daughters, mothers, and families, Moore wrote:
    Great literature of the past two centuries has sentimentalized politics, crime, nature, and madness, but seldom the family,and the wrenching incompatibility of a woman’s professional or artistic expression with her familial commitments has made its way into the most undidactic of literary minds. It has appeared, to powerful and unexpected effect, in much of Munro’s work, especially her most recent collection,
Runaway
.
    Moore detailed just how Munro accomplishes this throughout, paying special attention to “Passion” and to the Juliet triptych, and continued, saying of these stories that
    they are constructions of calm perplexity, coolly observed human mysteries. One can feel the suspense, poolside, as well as any reader of
The Da Vinci Code
; one can cast a quick eye toward one’s nine-year-old son on the high dive and get back to the exact sentence where one left off. The thrilling unexpectedness of real life, which Munro rightly insists on, will in her hands keep a reader glued – even if that reader is torn by the very conflicts (work to do, kid on the high dive) dramatized therein.
    For Moore, Munro is a writer whose “writing never loses its juice, never goes brittle; it also never equivocates or blinks, but simply lets observations speak for themselves. In fiction real turmoil is made artificial turmoil, only to seem real again; this is literary realism’s wish, and one of Munro’s compelling accomplishments.” Toward the end of this thorough review, Moore noted the absence of “Hired Girl” and “Fathers” from this, or any collection, though they have each appeared in the
New Yorker
. “Maybe even more stories are lying in wait,” she hoped. “Someone writing at this level well into her seventies, outliving the female friends to whose memory the book is dedicated and who must have been part of its inspiration, is a literary inspiration herself.”
    Major daily newspapers and national magazines to one side,
Runaway
showed every sign of reaching into publications with different audiences. On
Identity Theory
– identitytheory.com , which calls itself “a literary Web site, sort of” – for example, Angie Kritenbrink wrote that she wanted to “thank Whoever Is Listening that AliceMunro never went through an MFA program; instead, she has been able to craft her very own unique voice, in postmodern literature. Instead of being self-consciously avant garde or, well, postmodern, Munro’s stories have an organic feel – the way stories feel when they are being told by real women, with stops and starts, bends and turns, and going back for explanations, focusing more on feelings and reactions than twists of plot. There have been many times I have been reading Munro stories waiting for a question to be answered, a plot point to be revealed, only to realize that she wasn’t going to do it, and anyway that wasn’t the point of the story at all.”
    Besides on Web publications,
Runaway
was reviewed in popular national publications in the United States. Lee Aitken in
People
writes that “Munro is wise in the ways of human emotion, and her stories are so rich in subplots, asides and ancillary characters that even a tale of less than 50 pages feels as rounded as a novel.” In the same vein, in
USA Today
Maria Fish wrote that
Runaway
“may very well be the synthesizing work of literature’s keenest investigators into the human soul. It will, in any case, reach far beyond its time.” Franzen wrote that “Oprah Winfrey will not touch short story collections,” but
People
and
USA Today
certainly deal with the same mass market as Oprah Winfrey. 8
    Taking up the