Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

is like nothing else she has written before or since. 12

    The Everyman’s Library edition of Munro’s stories,
Carried Away
, which Knopf published alongside
The View from Castle Rock
, and which was later published in Canada in hardcover as
Alice Munro’s Best
and in paper as
My Best Stories
, contains what Alison Lurie in the
New York Review of Books
called a “generous and perceptive” introduction by Margaret Atwood. There, Atwood begins with this assertion: “Alice Munro is among the major writers of English fiction of our time.” Lurie’s own perceptive and extended review of Munro’s
oeuvre
and Atwood’s matter-of-fact and sharply incisive introduction – these together encapsulate the critical reception accorded
Castle Rock
. With that book as its final text (but also treating the 2005 edition of this biography, Sheila Munro’s
Lives of Mothers and Daughters
, and the Everyman
Carried Away)
, Lurie’s review essay of
The View from Castle Rock
constitutes clear recognition of Munro’s import and stature in late 2006. Her reading of Munro and her work is ample and informed, thoughtful and precise. As many reviewers of
Castle Rock
did, Lurie concludes by offering some lines from the cemetery scene toward the end of Munro’s epilogue, “Messenger.” The full passage reads, “We can’t resist this rifling around in the past, sifting the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable datesand anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life.” Connecting this with the final scene in “What Do You Want to Know For?,” Lurie writes: “The narrator and her husband wonder if there is oil in the lamp inside the mausoleum” that they have discovered, “so that it might somehow, one day, shine forth. Metaphorically, in this book, it already does.” Ending her review, which is called “The Lamp in the Mausoleum,” with these words, Lurie points to an essential element in Munro’s writing, asserting that “even in these stories, which are closest to her own history, Alice Munro’s commitment to indeterminacy and the essential confusion and mystery of life remains.” Citing the initial scene in “The View from Castle Rock,” when young Andrew and his grandfather look out from Castle Rock in Edinburgh, Lurie maintains that it “contains the message of the whole book: what you imagine as your future is not what you will get: the real future is always farther away and stranger, better and worse.”
    Another indicative long review in another august foreign publication, “The Sense of an Ending” by Stephen Henighan in the
Times Literary Supplement
, stands in sharp contrast to Lurie’s. It, too, is a wide-ranging overview of Munro and her career, but while the American shows herself generous, perceptive, and appreciative, Henighan comes across as dour, picky, and even petulant. Although writing after the flap in Canada over Munro’s announcement that
Castle Rock
would be her last book, and so in a position to be aware of the equivocal quality of that announcement, Henighan begins by taking the announcement as fact. He then proceeds to summarize Munro’s career, preferring her early, presumably more Canadian, work over that first published in the
New Yorker
, where, he nitpicks, there are many signs of a creeping Americanization (“college” for “university,” while the CBC becomes “the national radio network”). Ultimately he pronounces the book at hand “a disappointment” and sadly asserts as he ends that as “the concluding work in a remarkable career,
The View from Castle Rock
is not the ending for which Alice Munro would have wished.”
    Any reviewer is entitled to a sustained response to a book, certainly, so in that sense Henighan’s carpings are fair enough. As anotherCanadian reviewer of
Castle Rock
, John Moss, asserted in his review, “Nothing separates reviewers and critics like a new book by Alice Munro. The former, exercising taste in the present tense, is challenged to find fresh accolades to heap on the author. The latter, whose job is the exercise of judgement informed by an educated imagination, who writes with a sense of historical context, is charged with the task of explaining ‘why.’ Why is Munro so good, how does she do it, what makes her writing so stunning in its casual complexity, its intense directness?” Both Lurie and Henighan combine the two perspectives Moss reasonably