Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

Happiness
in the
New York Review of Books
, Joyce Carol Oates comments that this thirteenth collection’s title is “both cuttinglyironic and passionately sincere.” Another reviewer, Karen R. Long, in the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
, compares Munro to some of her contemporaries also writing into their old age, maintaining that E.L. Doctorow’s “last novel led into bleakness, and Philip Roth … now flirts with fetishizing decay and death.” Munro, in contrast, “is still turning the seams inside out on her characters to unpredictable and pleasurable surprise.” Continuing that the book’s stories “take up home invasion, child murder (twice), and creepy perversion of the old-man/young schoolgirl variety,” Long notes the collection’s “jolting” qualities and writes of “the tabloid grubbiness of the lives in
Too Much Happiness.”
Munro is a writer who “can make the lurid sing with nuance and explicability, particularly in her opening story, ‘Dimensions,’ about a young chambermaid living quietly several years after the trauma of a triple homicide,” one that killed her children.
    Just as Munro returned to the name “Willens,” which she had given to a character in one of her earliest published stories when she created the adulterous optometrist who is murdered in “The Love of a Good Woman,” with this opening story, “Dimensions,” harrowing and surprising, she echoes her younger self once again: “The Dimensions of a Shadow” was her first published story in
Folio
in 1950. That story, too, characteristically (and also obviously, in ways that reveal a young writer still very much grasping, even groping, toward her craft), moves toward a character’s innermost desires. Those desires – very much indicative of “the cruelty of the world” – are quite harsh, and suggest, as Menaker said, a view of “human behavior that is asocial, amoral, almost bestial but that will not be denied.” Munro, for her part, commented at the Toronto “Too Much Happiness!” event, when she was interviewed with Diana Athill, “I don’t understand the concept ‘ordinary people.’ ” To her, each of us is unique, often “touchable and mysterious” and also prone to frightening acts. Her stories unfurl, again and again, to reveal human beings being human. As so many reviewers and critics have written, and so many readers have paused to think:
This is what it feels like to be, to be alive, to be a human being
.
    Her “family book” done and published, Munro returned with
Too Much Happiness
to another collection of stories of the sort that has beenher hallmark since the 1980s. Most of its ten stories had been first published in the
New Yorker
in recent years – here there was some overlap, though, because of the historical and autobiographical cast of the previous book; two stories in
Too Much Happiness
, “Wenlock Edge” and “Dimensions,” appeared before
Castle Rock
. Three stories appeared first in
Harper’s
, confirming that the
New Yorker
editors had passed on them – the title story for reasons of length, certainly. As with every collection since
The Love of a Good Woman
, Munro includes a very long story that is also in some way surprising. In the case of “Too Much Happiness,” she offers another piece of historical fiction, but this one is focused on a real historical figure, a famous Russian mathematician named Sophia Kovalevsky. Almost as if she were sneering at those critics who have claimed that Munro focuses too exclusively on her own time, her own class, and her own place, here she offers a moving title story from the nineteenth century that never so much as mentions Canada, let alone Huron County, Ontario.
    A final story remains to be noted: “Wood.” First published in the
New Yorker
in November 1980, it had awaited inclusion in a collection ever since, almost thirty years. Unlike the fugitive pieces Munro incorporated into
Castle Rock
, “Wood” had no autobiographical cast to it – she and her editorial triumvirate just never agreed that it fit into a collection, as new collections were assembled and published (indeed, Ann Close was not sure it would make this one, where it appears just before the long title story, the last in the book). 17 The story of Roy Fowler, a sign painter whose overriding passion is different kinds of hardwood, the original 1980 version – for which Munro gleaned considerable information from Gerry Fremlin – originally focused on a