Alice Munros Best

fakery, what is authenticity? Which emotions and modes of behaviour and speech are honest and true, which pretended or pretentious? Or can they be separated? Munro’s characters think frequently about such matters.
    As in art, so in life. Hanratty society is divided in two by the river that flows through the town:
    In Hanratty the social structure ran from doctors and dentists and lawyers down to foundry workers and factory workers and draymen; in West Hanratty it ran from factory workers and foundry workers down to large improvident families of casual bootleggers and prostitutes and unsuccessful thieves.
    Each half of the town claims jeering rights against the other. Flo goes across to Hanratty, the better part of town, to shop, but also
    to see people, and listen to them. Among the people she listened to were Mrs. Lawyer Davies, Mrs. Anglican Rector Henley-Smith, and Mrs. Horse-Doctor McKay. She came home and imitated their flibberty voices. Monsters, she made them seem, of foolishness, and showiness, and self-approbation.
    But when Rose goes to college and boards with a lady professor and becomes engaged to Patrick, son of a West Coast department-store tycoon, and gets a look at upper middle-class surroundings, Flo in turn becomes monstrous in Rose’s eyes, and Rose is divided against herself. Patrick’s visit to Rose’s home town is a disaster for Rose:
    She felt ashamed on more levels than she could count. She was ashamed of the food and the swan and the plastic tablecloth; ashamed for Patrick,the gloomy snob, who made a startled grimace when Flo passed him the toothpick-holder; ashamed for Flo with her timidity and hypocrisy and pretensions; most of all ashamed of herself. She didn’t even have any way that she could talk, and sound natural.
    Yet as soon as Patrick begins to criticize her town and family, Rose feels “a layer of loyalty and protectiveness … hardening around every memory she had …”
    This state of divided allegiance applies to Munro’s vocation as well as to considerations of social status. Her fictional world is peopled with secondary characters who despise art and artifice, and any kind of pretentiousness or showing off. It’s against these attitudes and the self-mistrust they inspire that her central characters must struggle in order to free themselves enough to create anything at all.
    At the same time her writer protagonists share this scorn of the artificial side of art, and the distrust of it. What should be written about? How should one write? How much of art is genuine, how much just a bag of cheap tricks—imitating people, manipulating their emotions, making faces? How can one affirm anything about another person—even a made-up person—without presumption? Above all, how should a story end? (Munro often provides one ending, then questions or revises it. Or else she simply distrusts it, as in the final paragraph of “Meneseteung” where the narrator says, “I may have got it wrong.”) Isn’t the very act of writing an act of arrogance, isn’t the pen a broken reed? A number of stories—“Friend of My Youth,” “Carried Away,” “Wilderness Station,” “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage”—contain letters that display the vanity or falsity or even the malice of their writers. If the writing of letters can be so devious, what about writing itself?
    This tension has remained with her: as in “The Moons of Jupiter,” Munro’s artistic characters are punished for not succeeding, but they are punished also for success. The woman writer, thinking about her father, says:
    I could hear him saying, Well, I didn’t see anything about you in
Maclean’s.
And if he had read something about me, he would say, Well, I didn’t think too much of that write-up. His tone would be humorous andindulgent but would produce in me a familiar dreariness of spirit. The message I got from him was simple: Fame must be striven for, then apologized for. Getting or not getting it, you will be to blame.

    “Dreariness of spirit” is one of the great Munro enemies. Her characters do battle with it in every way they can, fighting against stifling mores and other people’s deadening expectations and imposed rules of behaviour, and every possible kind of muffling and spiritual smothering. Given a choice between being a person who does good works but has inauthentic feelings and is numb at heart and one who behaves badly but is true to what she really feels and is