Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

serious accident that Fowler had in the woods as he felled a tree, and how he saved himself. Now, almost thirty years later and doubtless having thought about what the story needed many, many times since, Munro the perpetual reviser has expanded Roy’s relationship with his wife, developed her character, extended the accident and the action, and so transformed it into a much deeper, much richer, and ultimately much more satisfying story of both surprise and redemption. Munro has, as always, continued to think the story through, to probe its heart, tocatch its essential beat. Looking at the first version of “Wood” and at its transformation into the much better version found in
Too Much Happiness
, a reader sees Munro’s transforming vision in microcosm. As Oates writes, the story “comes to a plausibly happy ending, where the reader has been primed to expect something quite different, as in one of Jack London’s gleefully grim little allegories of men succumbing to the wild.”
    The reviews of
Too Much Happiness
, already mentioned briefly, do have something of a valedictory air to them. But now there is a continuing meditation on just how Munro does what she does. Leah Hager Cohen, in yet another cover review in
The New York Times Book Review
, begins wondering if the Germans “have a term for it.
Dopplegedanken
, perhaps: the sensation, when reading, that your own mind is giving birth to the words as they appear on the page. Such is the ego that in these rare instances you wonder, ‘How could the author have known what I was thinking?’ Of course, what has happened isn’t this at all, though it’s no less astonishing. Rather, you’ve been drawn so deftly into another world that you’re breathing with someone else’s rhythms, seeing someone else’s visions as your own.” Thus Alice Munro’s
Too Much Happiness
. Cohen continues to talk of this story or that, expressing amazed reaction to what Munro accomplishes. (“The real story keeps turning out to be larger than, and at a canted angle to, what we thought it would be. The effect is initially destabilizing, then unexpectedly affirming.”) Taking on the perennial and by now quite clichéd Ozick exclamation of Munro as “our Chekhov,” Cohen concludes: “And at this point in Munro’s career, how much can [such comparisons] add? What is certain is this: She is our Munro. And how fortunate we are to call her that.”

    Although less concerned with Munro’s effects than Cohen is, Anne Enright considers Munro’s presence as a model, and in the
Globe and Mail
asserts that “The most salutary thing, for her fellow writers, is the way that Munro, buffeted by our adulation, has carried on doing exactly what she has always done, with scarcely a wobble on the highwire. Of course, she might deny that there is a wire, she might say that she is just walking on the ground. But it is a mistake to say that writers do not know what they are doing; in my experience, they know very well.”
    As the entire trajectory of Munro’s career has shown, and as has been detailed here, Enright’s discerning assertion applies utterly to Alice Munro. W.P. Kinsella, who himself stopped writing fiction in his sixties, marvels at this in a review titled “Everything is Funny” (a remark that Munro once made to him when he noticed for the first time that one of her stories was funny – even, one adds, ironic titles like “Too Much Happiness”). Reading this collection, he sees Munro still writing at the highest level: these stories are “as good as anything she written in her long career.… The language is always crisp and clear, like the tinkling of bells. Reading becomes a compulsion: one has to find out what is going to happen.”
    Surveying the reviews of
Too Much Happiness
, one finds apt phrasings, sharp insights, and evidence of great care in reading wherever one looks. Philip Marchand, who in 2007 published an essay entitled “The Problem with Alice Munro” where he bewails the sameness of Munro’s vision, takes up
Too Much Happiness
in the spirit of something of a deathbed conversion; he begins his review in the
National Post
by asserting that “If Alice Munro had never existed, part of the soul of Canada would have remained inarticulate, forgotten, submerged.… It has always been Munro’s aesthetic to ‘tell stories to make your hair curl.’ ” 18 Christopher Taylor, writing in the
Guardian
, offers this clear summation: “Rural or puritanical