Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

defines here, although each comes to different conclusions and each, too, is representative of the poles of response
Castle Rock
garnered. Most reviewers, just as Moss maintains, responded favorably to the book and struggled to find more laudatory things to say, while a few – like Henighan, proceeding from other aesthetic expectations and either unwilling to understand the book’s unusual position between memoir and fiction or rejecting its effects – chose to find fault and dismiss. That such treatment would eventually come to a writer as celebrated as Munro is certainly not surprising. Nor, given literary values passing from one generation to the next and the jealousy born of long reputation, is it anything other than human.
    Surveying the reviews of
Castle Rock
, what is surprising is how little of this hostile treatment the book actually received. In that vein, Darryl Whetter offers a review in the
Toronto Star
(where the subheading asserts that “the failure of this new collection – a kind of fictional family tree – comes as a shock”) and writes that “sadly, Munro’s normally enviable skills simply do not transform what ultimately remains a private history.” Like Henighan, this reviewer sees “Hired Girl” as what he calls “the collection’s one gem” – and before that, “we have a narrator-character wedged between these ancestral characters and us. The narrator’s own story doesn’t emerge fully until late in the book.…” Whetter sees that happening in “Hired Girl” and, apparently, manages to miss Munro’s subsequent transformation in “The Ticket,” “Home,” and the balance of her text.
    By way of contrast we see Hilary Mantel, writing in
The Guardian
, discussing Munro’s ancestor, James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, authorof
The Confessions of a Justified Sinner
, and the man who helped Sir Walter Scott “steal” the ballads he published in
The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border
(1802). Following Munro, Mantel writes that “It’s difficult to draw a line between the objective truth and the truth in his head; and some readers are uncomfortable if they can’t draw the lines between genres.” Such readers as Henighan and Whetter, certainly. Mantel asserts that
The View from Castle Rock
is “an act of salvage rather than appropriation. It is a memoir that has taken a breath, and expanded itself beyond genre and beyond the confines of one life.… Just as there is no real division here between fiction and non-fiction, there is no turning point at which the epic story of emigration gives way to observation of the nuance and detail of settled lives.”
    And John Moss, for his part, asserts that
Castle Rock
is not just a memoir; “it is something else, a major achievement, and an exciting revitalisation of a somewhat exhausted genre.… It is a memoir as only Alice Munro could write it. Are there stories in it? Is it fiction? Well, of course.… The difference is, the fiction here is neither subterfuge nor self-enhancing. It is an essential element of an intimate past, both ancestral and remembered, that is transformed by the author into shared revelation.” With this book, Moss concludes, “Munro proves herself once again one of those rare writers whose work changes the lives of her readers.”
    Seen together, a large grouping of the reviews of
The View from Castle Rock
most frequently take up, as Mantel and Moss do, the numerous ways in which the historical interacts with the fictive in the book to create the numinous. Neil Besner, a sharp, longstanding, and well-informed critic of Munro’s work, especially notes the book’s second section, “Home.” In his review in the
Winnipeg Free Press
he maintains that “there is everywhere a deeply felt sense of connection to the climate of feeling inhabited by her father – not only his beliefs, expressed and more often silent, but to his habits of thought. In this collection, Munro follows that sense of connection more strongly and widely than she has before. And she does so incomparably.” He speaks of Munro’s “more intimately focused returns, guided by a writer always aware of, and inquiring into her own pastward gaze, with its momentsof deception or deceit – and of revelation.” Surveying the stories making up the second section of
Castle Rock
within the context of the stories contained in
Carried Away
, A.O. Scott writes in the
New York Times
that “Whether they are the literal truth is beyond irrelevant.