Alice Munro - Writing Her Lives

suspicions of pretension, which often oppress her characters, have left their impress on her writing style, too. Her prose is clean, precise and unmannered; her stories are attentive to emotion but almost witheringly unsentimental. She is also a storyteller rather than a maker of atmospheric vignettes, not afraid to shift chronology around or have dramatic things happen.” Like many readers, Taylor pays especial attention to “Fiction,” one of the volume’s very best, along with the title story. After describing it, he writes: “Laid out in a short summary, the story’s workings – the lessons and counter-lessons in fiction making; thefluent, dramatic changes of perspective; the approach to, and retreat from, generalising wisdom – inevitably seem a bit squashed. On the page, though, they hang together beautifully, without strain; and the same holds true for many of the other pieces in the book.” Munro’s stories, just as Cohen mused, “create a powerful illusion of bringing their readers up against unmediated life.…”
    Michael Gorra, in perhaps the best single review of
Too Much Happiness
to be found, writes in the
Times Literary Supplement
of Munro’s effects at length and with what seems stunning insight. Looking back to
Castle Rock
, he acknowledges the notion of it being her last book but maintains that “with time [it] will stand as something like her Enigma of Arrival.” By this he means that the book will be seen as a critical text for Munro, capturing her own explanations and wonderings over her ancestry. More than that, her work’s singularity “lies in the fact that it has never seemed to be about her” – by this he seems to mean not that it is without autobiographical material, but rather that she has been able to rise beyond the descriptive to the universal, since “this collection does show the blend of continuity and change that one wants and hopes to find in a late book by a master.” Focusing closely on “Some Women” (Munro’s story that begins, “I’m amazed sometimes to think how old I am” before it tells a story from the narrator’s teenaged girlhood), Gorra asks, “What did the narrator learn that summer that has to do with the fact of her own old age? What prompts her memory? It’s too easy to say that its last words [“I grew up, and old”] make the narrator herself into the subject of the tale, and these questions must remain unanswered. The fact that we ask them is, however, one mark of Munro’s power. We ask, and trust the narrator precisely because she gives no answers; trust that she herself knows, even if she can’t or won’t tell us.”
    Gorra then argues that “Many great poets have lived and worked to a fine age; few fiction writers have.… Unlike Philip Roth [Munro] does not seem to rage at the indignity of years, and yet if I had to reduce the concerns of
Too Much Happiness
to a single word, it would be ‘mortality.’ ”
    Moving through “Dimensions,” Gorra spends considerable attention on “Free Radicals” – its “conclusion is even terser than that of‘Some Women,’ a two-word paragraph which feels like no ending at all: ‘Never know.’ It leaves Nita physically safe but with her situation unresolved; only death will do that. Munro has always had an ability to take a narrative corner at speed, to whip a story into a new direction at the last minute. But the corners are now tighter than ever, single words or sentences that seem marked by an epigrammatic impatience with the whole business of endings; as though every tale might allow for an alternative version and no story is ever really over.”
    Presumably, Gorra has not studied the proof materials in the
New Yorker
files, or even Munro’s proof pages for
Too Much Happiness
at the Alice Munro Fonds at the University of Calgary. There, not at all surprisingly, anyone can see Munro working on her endings – perpetually, as she always has, sometimes in concert with an editor, sometimes in defiance of an editor screaming for final delivery of a perfectly fine existing ending, sometimes alone: the endings of her stories always matter, they get the most attention, the most frequent changes. Gorra is right about Munro’s writing. Continuing to wonder over Nita in “Free Radicals,” Gorra writes tellingly about Munro’s ongoing effects on her readers, saying that “the drama of her situation will remain in my head long after I have forgotten the story’s precise ending. I