Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Chatto & Windus
Runaway
, editors in the United Kingdom clearly saw it as something of an inspiration too, since the book received extensive and detailed notice. In the
Economist
, the reviewer held that these “plots ring true but never feel trite. Ms. Munro’s prose is translucent, never intruding. Indeed, her whole approach is a humble one, focused on the stories themselves. It is easy to overlook how skilfully they are told.” In the
Spectator
, Sebastian Smee confessed that “it is difficult, I find, to go from reading Munro’s work to reading almost any other contemporary fiction (I tend to stick to non-fiction for a while). By comparison, other authors’ voices seem naïve, histrionic or absurdly style-conscious.” Smee calls Munro’s “almost melodramatic congestion of coincidence, tragedy and death” in the Juliet triptych especially, but throughout, “a kind of aesthetic brinkmanship.” He continued:
    Munro will stretch the credibility of her plot to breaking point; yet somehow, in pointing to the very real limits of empathy, she elicits a nod of hard-hearted recognition more powerful and seductive than even the most compassionate and all-encompassing prose.
    The key to it all is the quality that is easiest to pinpoint but hardest to achieve; Munro’s characters never breathe the thin, tangy air of melodrama. They move in the richer, more oxidised atmosphere of great fiction.
    Paul Bailey, in the
Independent
, asserted that the art of Alice Munro is rightly called “incomparable,” that Munro’s great gift “is to pull the rug out from beneath the reader’s feet at the very point when he or she feels secure. These reminders of the haphazard nature of human relationships are delivered to chilling effect, frequently in one well-placed sentence.” Bailey says further that this is “the moment when her pen becomes a scalpel, cutting away at the certainties that have sustained her characters.” Unlike other critics, though, Bailey found to his dismay that the third story in the Juliet triptych, “Silence,” falters – there Juliet “has outstayed her welcome. She is no longer interesting.” In the same vein, he found “Tricks” dissatisfying as well and in “Powers,” “potentially the most resonant story” in the collection, Munro “becomes diffuse, wayward and unsure of where she is going.”
    Writing in the
Irish Times
, Éilís Ní Dhubhne called
Runaway
a treasure and, although the book would probably not be the best book to begin reading Munro’s writing, “for those familiar with her work … the collection is a precious gem.” She is a writer who “has lived and written on, and changed. Yeats, I think, said that hard thinking was the basis of good art. Alice Munro is lyrical, painterly, comic, but she is a thinker. Her ideas mature with every book. This is a real cause for literary celebration.” In the
Times
of London, Tom Gatti wrote that
Runaway
is “an echo-chamber of a book” since, like Faulkner, “Munro is aware of the impossibility of ever truly ‘starting over’ ” despite her characters’ attempts to run away. “Millions of words have been spilt inattempts to tell us exactly what it means to be human. In eight short stories … Munro performs that very miracle.”
    Alan Hollinghurst, who reviewed Munro’s work in the 1970s and 1980s, brought that perspective to his review of
Runaway
in the
Guardian
. He likened the Juliet triptych to
The Beggar Maid
and commented on Munro’s ability to manipulate “gaps and jumps in time” by which she creates “the effect in each case of a life revealed, not a life explained, and certainly not a life explained away. [Munro] knows that life in the past was unhampered by any sense of its future quaintness, so she doesn’t explain. She gives us a past as unselfconscious as today.” Concluding, Hollinghurst focused on a passage from “Passion” – which he called “among the finest things she has ever done” – and wrote that “Munro has never made a fuss about sex, but a deep understanding of it is integral, in different ways, to each of these stories.”
    A similar extended and thoughtful treatment was offered by Mary Hawthorne in the
London Review of Books
. She began with an extended biographical overview of Munro and, before she took up
Runaway
, offered this reminiscence of her own:
    Years ago, I came across a note written by Munro in the margin of the last galley of “Oranges and Apples” (a