Alice Munros Best

INTRODUCTION

    Alice Munro is among the major writers of English fiction of our time. She’s been accorded armfuls of super-superlatives by critics in both North America and the United Kingdom, she’s won many awards, and she has a devoted international readership. Among writers themselves, her name is spoken in hushed tones. Most recently she’s been used as a stick to flog the enemy with, in various inter-writerly combats. “You call this writing?” the floggers say, in effect. “Alice Munro! Now
that’s
writing!” She’s the kind of writer about whom it is often said—no matter how well-known she becomes—that she ought to be better known.
    None of this happened overnight. Alice Munro has been writing since the 1960s, and her first collection—
Dance of the Happy Shades
—appeared in 1968. To date she has published eleven collections, averaging nine or ten stories each. Though her fiction has been a regular feature of
The New Yorker
since the 1970s, her recent elevation to international literary sainthood took as long as it did partly because of the form in which she writes. She is a writer of stories—“short stories,” as they used to be called, or “short fiction,” which is now more common. Though many American and British and Canadian writers of the first rank have practised this form, there is still a widespread but false tendency to equate length with importance.
    Thus Alice Munro has been among those writers subject to periodic rediscovery, at least outside Canada. It’s as if she jumps out of a cake—
Surprise!
—and then has to jump out of it again, and then again. Readers don’t see her name in lights on every billboard. They come across her as if by accident or fate, and are drawn in, and then there is an outbreak of wonder and excitement, and incredulity—
Where did Alice Munro come from? Why didn’t anybody tell me? How can such excellence have sprung from nowhere?
But Alice Munro did not spring from nowhere. She sprang—though it’s a verb her characters would find overly sprightly, and indeed pretentious—from Huron County, in south-western Ontario.
    Ontario is the large province of Canada that stretches from the Ottawa River to the western end of Lake Superior. This is a huge and varied space, but south-western Ontario is a distinct part of it. It was named Sowesto by the painter Greg Curnoe, a name that has stuck. Curnoe’s view was that Sowesto was an area of considerable interest, but also of considerable psychic murkiness and oddity, a view shared by many. Robertson Davies, also from Sowesto, used to say, “I know the dark folkways of my people,” and Alice Munro knows them, too. You are likely to run into quite a few signs in Sowesto wheat fields telling you to be prepared to meet your God, or else your doom—felt to be much the same thing.
    Lake Huron lies at the western edge of Sowesto, Lake Erie to the south. The country is mostly flat farmland, cut by several wide, winding rivers prone to flooding, and on the rivers—because of the available boat transport, and the power provided by water-driven mills—a number of smaller and larger towns grew up in the nineteenth century. Each has its red-brick town hall (usually with a tower), each its post-office building and its handful of churches of various denominations, each its main street and its residential section of gracious homes, and its other residential section on the wrong side of the tracks. Each has its families with long memories and stashes of bones in the closets.
    Sowesto contains the site of the famous Donnelly Massacre of the nineteenth century, when a large family was slaughtered and their home burnt as a result of political resentments carried over from Ireland. Lush nature, repressed emotions, respectable fronts, hidden sexual excesses, outbreaks of violence, lurid crimes, long-held grudges, strange rumours—none are ever far away in Munro’s Sowesto, partly because all have been provided by the real life of the region itself.
    Oddly enough, a number of writers have come from Sowesto. Oddly, because when Alice Munro was growing up in the 1930s and ′40s, the idea of a person from Canada—but especially one from small-town south-western Ontario—thinking they could be a writer to be takenseriously in the world at large was laughable. Even by the ′50s and ′60s there were very few publishers in Canada, and these were mostly textbook publishers who imported whatever so-called literature