Who Do You Think You Are

the idiot savant whose genius is mimicry, is the spitting image, in fact and reputation, of a man who lived and died in the Goulds and whose first name was Bucky.
    Rose’s experience at university in the story “The Beggar Maid,” where she falls in love and is forever hoping that her past, like a bra strap or a slip with a frayed hem, isn’t “showing,” reminds me so much of my own first years away from home that when I read Who Do You Think You Are? I often think I will turn the page and find that the Munro microscope has been turned on me, that not someone like me or just like me but that I have somehow strayed into the book and my existence, my most intrinsic nature, is about to be summed up by one laceratingly accurate observation.
    That kind of recognition is something you experience only when reading a great writer. At the same time, only a great writer can combine such observations with others that demonstrate great sympathy for her characters, even a comradeship with them, the upshot of which is “I do not spare myself, I examine myself as closely as I do others. I write about ‘us,’ not ‘them.’” This is for me essential to great writing, that the writer regard people as us and not them.
    “Simon’s Luck,” the first two-thirds of which might be mistaken by an imperceptive or bloody-minded reader as yet another story about the romantic treachery of men, ends this way: “It was preposterous, it was unfair, that such a chunk of information should have been left out, and that Rose even at this late date could have thought herself the only person who could seriously lack power.” It would somewhat spoil the story for the reader to spell out what “it” is, but suffice to say that it is the sort of thing that seems meant to be discovered too late, to be recollected with irony, that being the only way to endure it.
    My favourite story by far in the book is the title story, “Who Do You Think You Are?” The question is posed to Rose by one of the two maiden aunts who act as Milton Homer’s guardians and who also happens to be Rose’s English teacher.
    Rose and her fellow students are instructed by Miss Hattie to memorize a poem by writing it out countless times. Rose is able to quickly memorize the poem without writing it out even once and says so to Miss Hattie, who challenges her to recite the poem, which Rose does flawlessly. Nevertheless, Miss Hattie keeps Rose behind after school as punishment and has her copy out three times the already memorized poem.
    Miss Hattie says, in a mild, solicitous tone of voice, “You can’t go thinking you are better than other people just because you can learn poems. Who do you think you are?”
    Afterwards, Rose realizes that “Miss Hattie was not a sadistic teacher.… The lesson she was trying to teach here was more important to her than any poem, and one she truly believed Rose needed. It seemed that many other people believed she needed it, too.” But the true crux of the story is a character named Ralph Gillespie, who sits behind Rose in class. There is a romantic chumminess between them that anyone who ever had a crush on the person they sat next to in class will understand, a crush that for some reason cannot be sustained outside the classroom.
    Many years after Rose has left Hanratty and become an actress/television personality she returns and sees and speaks with Ralph, who is now a pensioned and disabled Navy veteran, at a Legion card game. There is, not to Rose’s surprise, a great gulf between them. She got out and he did not. But she is still drawn to him and knows that there is something she wants and must say to him though she cannot decide what it is.
    They part with it unsaid and Rose, years later, reads in the local paper of Ralph Gillespie’s death. If there are people who still think that Alice Munro in her stories mocks the people of her hometown and the town where she presently lives as some vague form of revenge or contempt should consult “Who Do You Think You Are?” and read these closing, beautiful lines:
    What could she say about herself and Ralph Gillespie, except that she felt his life, close, closer than the lives of men she’d loved, one slot over from her own?

Who Do You Think You Are?

Royal Beatings
    Royal Beating . That was Flo’s promise. You are going to get one Royal Beating.
    The word Royal lolled on Flo’s tongue, took on trappings. Rose had a need to picture things, to pursue absurdities, that was